System Interoperability Web Data-exchange Service Bus For Integrating Health Information Systems
Abstract
Given the need to manage increasing information and knowledge within Kenya‟s health
sector, developments in information technology have become more crucial to meet the
required demand. Healthcare providers especially government hospitals have made huge
investments towards infrastructure improvement and development/purchase of new required
health management information systems. Despite the government and private healthcare
providers having invested considerably more in the acquisition of various systems, these
systems cannot generate expected outcomes if not integrated to achieve common national
goals like measuring of health service delivery, morbidity control, etc. A fundamental
concern in health management is the integration of health information across distributed,
heterogeneous and disparate information systems. Lack of interoperable health systems is
one of the major barriers to the use of health information.
DHIS 2 is a national health information system (HIS) that was deployed in the country by the
government of Kenya in 2010, its function is monitoring health, and evaluating and
improving the delivery of health-care services and programs in the country. It is also used for
reporting, analysis and dissemination of health data obtained from health facilities and
hospitals nationwide. Thus the processed and analysed information from DHIS2 is used for
national Health Decision Making by the government health managers, stakeholders and
donors for resource allocation. However untimely, incomplete and inaccurate data are the
main challenges that have faced the national HIS since the health reporting is paper based
dominated and also due to lack of integration between the fragmented health information
systems that could submit health data electronically and automatically without using the
paper reporting tools.
In this work through literature review, the research is based on a need for a software
infrastructure that will enable integration of the national DHIS2 with the other existing
disparate HISs used in health facilities in order to promote interoperability between the
systems. Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is a new computing paradigm that utilizes
services as the basic constructs in development of rapid, low-cost and easy composition of
distributed system. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) was adopted as the application
framework in designing, building and implementing the service-based solution. Enterprise
Service Bus (ESB) a layer of middleware through which a set of core (reusable) services are
made widely available, this approach was used in development of a web data exchange
service bus for integrating the HISs thus facilitating interoperability of the different systems
across platforms, enhance communication and data exchange.
After the development and evaluation of the Web Data Exchange Bus that enabled an
instance of DHIS2 Kenya to interoperate with other Partner-HISs, it is evident that SOA
enabled-infrastructure is the most ideal method of integrating systems compared to others
methods like point-to-point integrations (through Application Programming Interfaces -
APIs) which provides no flexibility of systems changes without impacting on each other. The
study demonstrated that Service Bus can be used to integrate new Web Service (WS) based
systems with legacy systems that do not have APIs functionalities.
Publisher
University of Nairobi
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United StatesUsage Rights
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/Collections
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