OpenHealth Suite of Interoperable Tools for Public Health Informatics

Abstract Text:

Recent advances in technologies, including open source development and the emergence of standards for technology integration provide new promise for more coordinated and sustainable approaches to surveillance and health information systems development. 

Currently, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Health Metrics Network (HMN) are coordinating efforts to build a broad-based collaboration with partners with a view to establishing an interoperable and standards-based framework of health data and tools.  The suite of tools will provide a common health platform to support a wide range of health data and public health business domains and will encompass data collection, transfer, consolidation, analysis, visualization and reporting capabilities. The development of an integrated toolkit for countries will offer the guidelines to strengthen country-specific strategies, plans and kits as well as resources to use to deploy well integrated HIS tools within their own environment.

WHO's OpenHealth platform is designed to provide an integration framework to link tools and software applications, such as the District Health Information System (DHIS), OpenMRS and others.  By leveraging and building on the capabilities of existing products, the integration of tools across one common platform will achieve economies of scale over time, pull resources and align stakeholders around the loosely coupled suite of tools.