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Interoperability Roadmap
Iaso, whose name was taken from the name of a Greek goddess for health, has initially been developed to support national health programmes in their data collection and organization of geographical information in remote and low connectivity areas. Since then, it has also been used in other fields, such as education and environmental projects.
Iaso builds on three essential concepts users, forms (in XLSForm format) and org units (e.g. districts and facilities) with a focus on structuring data collection along geographic lines to allow for splitting responsibility geographically, as is commonly done in health programs. This allows to decentralize monitoring, validation and team management. It also allows to have out of the box completeness reporting for data collection.
Iaso has been recognized as a Global Good for Health by Digital Square. As such, Bluesquare acknowledges the importance of making Iaso as interoperable as possible in order to facilitate data exchange within the global digital health ecosystem such as the Open Health Information Exchange (OpenHIE) community.
The below below standard technologies are already being used by Iaso today:
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Data collection: XLSForm, CSV
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Geographical data: geopackage
Iaso data collection can be done through forms in the common XLSForm format used for example by ODK, and allows to import and export data to DHIS2 (thanks to a user-friendly mapping interface), which is not per se using open formats in general, but is a de facto standard in some health topics, DHIS2 being probably the most installed open source health information management system.
Iaso allows imports and exports of geographical data through the geopackage format which is the relatively new golden standard for Geographical Information Systems.
- Short-term (by end of 2023)
- DHIS2 Tracker data import/export
Recently, we implemented case management features in Iaso, which is mainly the possibility to collect and store data about individuals. One goal will be to further develop the integration between Iaso and DHIS2 Tracker, to allow the import and export of data linked to individuals. As DHIS2 Tracker has already implemented the FHIR standard, this will ease the process of integrating both softwares.
- FHIR
In the same context as above, Bluesquare would ensure that Iaso is compatible with the FHIR standard for health care data exchange. That said, Iaso is a generic data collection tool, and consequently we can’t enforce that collected data always uses a predefined set of fields. Consequently, support of FHIR for case management would be made on a project basis, and where Bluesquare could help is by providing documentation of how to implement some parts of the FHIR standard.
On the other hand, Iaso is a very complete facility list management system and here, there is a very good opportunity to adopt OHIE facility registry standards. This will be studied by the end of the year and implemented if we can identify a project needing the feature.
- Long-term (end of 2023 and beyond)
- Better sharing of documentation about Iaso
Iaso’s code and general information is published on the dedicated Github repository
Bluesquare has started to organize processes to ensure more easily accessible documentation about Iaso, that will benefit the open source health softwares community. An evolving user guide will be made available on https://readthedocs.org/, together with more technical documentation on new features. A high-level roadmap on next features will also be published and maintained.
To facilitate interoperability, we are in the process of publishing the api specification in the OpenAPI standard (the format used by the Swagger tool).
- Microplanning
Iaso is growing more and more to be a planning system, e.g. for vaccination campaigns. We need to investigate if there are existing standards (outside of calendar standards like caldav) , especially in the OHIE specification that could be reused to expose our plannings to external systems.
- Logistics
There is a growing demand for Iaso to be able to handle logistics, in order to monitor stocks of certain health-related or other supplies, such as vaccines, mosquito nets in certain locations. If Iaso would further develop features in this field, Bluesquare will make sure to follow the openHIE “Logistics Management Information System (LMIS)” and “Product Catalogue” components principles.