VIRTUAL – Standards and Interoperability Lab – Asia (SIL-Asia), together with HAPI-FHIR, Ontoserver, OpenMRS, OpenIMIS, and the KIRA Kontra COVID, presented an interoperability demo at the ‘Foundations for Interoperable Digital Health Infrastructure‘ session under the Health Systems Architecture track of the Global Digital Health Forum 2020 last December 9, 2020.
This showcase demonstrated how interoperability could be used to bring various information systems to solve healthcare problems, especially during a pandemic. Specifically, the interoperability demo answered these questions:
- How do you transfer data from a triage app to a case reporting form?
- How do you transfer data from a health facility to a health insurance system?
- How can we quickly use interoperability to improve data flow from the patient to the national covid database?
In this demo, the team showed how Kira Kontra COVID, a symptom reporting Viber bot supported by the United Nations Development Programme and AI4Gov, can be used by patients to send their COVID-19 symptoms via Viber. The symptoms reported were then submitted automatically to openMRS, an electronic medical record system assumed to be used by primary care physicians in this demo. This automatic submission would allow the physician to easily create a clinical record for the patient, which will then automatically file insurance claims.
Flow of Interoperability Demo at the GDHF 2020
The openIMIS or open-source insurance management information system would then be used for the processing of claims. In the demo, we saw how data from the symptoms reporting bot were transferred to the EMR and finally to the insurance system in an interoperable manner. Data entered once during symptoms reporting were used multiple times for different purposes, such as documenting medical records and filing insurance claims.
Hosted by the Global Digital Health Network, the Global Digital Health Forum is an annual digital health gathering that brings together the digital health leaders from across the world to reflect on and shape the future of the community. Previous GDHFs have been held in Washington, D.C. The GDHF 2020 proved to be an important forum this year due to the accelerated use of digital health tools amid the pandemic. This year’s theme is ‘Digital Health – Making it Work for Everyone.’
To learn more about HL7-FHIR initiatives in Asia Pacific, visit this blog on the ‘Growth of Interoperability Labs in the Asia Pacific Region.’
The concept for the Standards and Interoperability Lab – Asia was first conceived at the Regional Interoperability Workshop organized by AeHIN in Manila last August 2015 at the sidelines of the Global Health Research Forum. The regional lab was designed to serve as a template of labs in each country that will later form into the Community of Interoperability Labs (COIL).
