Enhancing the interoperability of public health systems in Uganda using a data exchange module

Abstract

With an increasing adoption of digital health systems by the Ministry of Health in Uganda, adequate digital health systems interoperability has become a major concern. The need for these systems to coexist and complement each other has also increased the need for 1) secure and reliable health information exchange, 2) scalable message transfer and 3) simpli ed management and control for information being exchanged. In our project, we have developed a secure data exchange module (Dispatcher2) that can be used to integrate at least two disparate digital health systems. Dispatcher2 implements a simple commu- nication protocol that governs information exchange between any pair of applications it integrates. It relies on a persistent queue to o er message persistence and improved traceability for the information being exchanged. It also ships with management web interfaces that manage the message queue and con gurations for the systems it integrates. Our project has endeavored to follow existing interoperability standards and recommendations whenever possible. It has been simulated with 3 publically used health systems in Uganda, that is; mTrac, mTracPro and DHIS 2. The performance of the solution has also been analyzed and it was able to achieve a throughput of over 300 transactions per second and an average response time of about 9.78ms on laptop hardware. More results from our project are discussed in detail in this report.