A modern vision of health interoperability is one where systems exchange health care data using the FHIR (Fast Health Interoperability Resources) standard to describe the types of resources and data to be exchanged. FHIR outlines these resources and data using what is called an Implementation Guide (IG). An IG specifies the rules for interoperability in a formal, machine-readable, and testable way. In this post, we will show you how to stand up a FHIR gateway for DHIS2 from an IG so that DHIS2 can interoperate with FHIR clients.

We're pleased to announce the release of UI 9, which includes support for TypeScript. All the UI components and forms now have type definitions, which will make it easier to use UI in TypeScript projects, or have better auto-completion in JavaScript projects.

We are excited about the recent release of Progressive Web App (PWA) features in our App Platform, which you can read about in this blog post introducing them, and we think we have some interesting stories to share about their development. We faced interesting design challenges as we sought to make these features easily generalizable to any app, and the ways we used available technologies to solve those challenges are quite unique. The purpose of this post is to share our novel approach to managing service worker lifecycles and other PWA functionality in a generic way.

COVID-19 has highlighted the importance of having public laboratories efficiently integrated with the rest of the healthcare architecture. It’s been shown through numerous case studies that connecting labs with the country’s health information exchanges (HIEs) significantly facilitates critical activities such as disease surveillance, notification of test results, reporting to stakeholders, and inventory control. It follows that DHIS2 can play a pivotal role in these use cases. Imagine the national Health Management Information System (HMIS) displaying the daily tally of new positive tuberculosis cases on its dashboard as soon as the test results are available at the lab, or a surveillance system notifying patients of their results. Another innovative use case gaining traction is for DHIS2 to collect the state of lab diagnostics (i.e., error rates, usage frequency, online status, etc…) in order to simplify their management.

As we’ve recently had the DHIS2 Annual Conference, we’ve also completed the 2023 App Competition tied to the conference. On Thursday, the finalists were able, in 7 minutes, to present their Android or Web application, and once all were done, the audience decided which app they thought was the best.

At HISP Centre, we've been engineering numerous run-of-the-mill integration projects where data is exchanged back and forth with DHIS2 through its Web API. Typically, this data is filtered, mapped, transformed, enriched, and routed to or from an application which could be the same DHIS2 instance, a different instance, or even a distinct application altogether.

The general availability of DHIS-to-RapidPro was announced in the DHIS 2.39 release. Funded by UNICEF, DHIS-to-RapidPro provides connectivity between DHIS2 and an open-source workflow engine geared towards mobile-based services called RapidPro.

DHIS-to-RapidPro is a reliable, extensible, operations-friendly Java solution, powered by Apache Camel, that offers:

• Routine synchronisation of RapidPro contacts with DHIS2 users.
• Aggregate report transfer from RapidPro to DHIS2 via polling or webhook messaging.
• Automated reminders to RapidPro contacts when their aggregate reports are overdue.

We have just released a new major version of the app-platform: version 10. Upgrading to version 10 should be relatively easy for all apps currently using version 9 of cli-app-scripts. In this post we'll walk you through the most important change for this release.

Tracker-to-Aggregate, or T2A for short, is a pattern that has been used with great success when improving the performance of program indicators in DHIS2. Program indicators are expressions based on data elements and attributes of tracked entities which can be used to calculate values based on a formula. T2A can solve the problem where it’s computationally expensive to calculate program indicators in real-time. A common symptom to this recurring problem is an endless spinning circle when opening a dashboard that computes a program indicator over millions of tracked entity instances:

DHIS2 is a platform that can receive and host data from different sources, while it can also share data with other systems and reporting mechanisms. Integrating with DHIS2, or building any integration for that matter, requires manual or automated testing of the integration itself. The growth of container technology, and in particular Docker, has reduced the pain of automating the testing of integrations. By automating, I mean self-contained integration test suites that run out-of-the-box and require no manual setup of their external runtime dependencies (Docker Engine is assumed to be installed on the machine running the tests).