As the OpenHIE community continues to grow, many of our community members have appreciated the growing country demand for support and technical expertise related to health data sharing architectures.  To further the mission and vision of the OpenHIE community, we want to find ways to support countries in a way that is sustainable and focused upon building capacity within countries in as efficient of a way as possible.  Members of the OHIE community are available to assist you in your preliminary planning and design stages. As your efforts become more concrete, OHIE partners can be engaged to provide additional, on-going, support for detailed planning, implementation and production.

As such, organizations and individuals within the OpenHIE community can provide countries various levels of support as they navigate this activity within their country.  Not only can members of the community provide direct technical expertise, we can also serve as neutral advisors, facilitators, and consultants to in-country stakeholder consensus building processes.

Members of the OpenHIE community can help with the following:

Governance

  1. Identifying and learning from the key stakeholders within a data sharing enterprise

  2. Helping to develop decision-making models that empower key stakeholders to influence and shape the data exchange over time

  3. Provide various examples of governance models that have been implemented in other countries

  4. Compare and contrast the strengths and weaknesses of various governance models for a given environment

  5. Facilitate early engagements of newly formed governance structures, as a neutral third party

Policy Development

  • Co-develop data sharing agreement templates between data producers and consumers

  • Co-develop privacy and confidentiality documents

  • Gather, curate and provide examples of relevant data exchange and sharing policies and policy frameworks

Technical Design

  • Share OpenHIE architectural models with stakeholders within country

  • Educate and provide peer mentorship to various key technical members within country around standards and interoperability concepts

  • Develop iterative technical architectures that take into account / leverage existing technologies within a country

  • Document and educate broader community within country on planned architectural vision, and implications for ongoing work

  • Gather, curate and provide examples of other country architectural models

Use Case Iteration

  • Work with key health domain leadership to document and describe data sharing challenges that pre-exist within country, develop technical designs to respond to these use cases

  • Examine existing paper-based workflows to identify areas where OpenHIE could help optimize current practices   

Operationalizing Strategies and Implementation Technical Assistance (Support)

  • Develop short term tactical approaches to operationalize an overarching eHealth strategy

  • Develop implementation and costing plans consistent with tactical approaches

  • Provide direct technical assistance in either a direct or supportive capacity to local stakeholders

Training and Capacity Building Activities

  • Facilitation of Connect-a-thon and Hack-a-thon activities

  • Mentorship and training for local and regional HIE architects, software developers and system administrators

  • Serve as a connection hub for different country and regional health enterprise architects to facilitate peer learning, mentorship, and exchange of success stories and lessons learned

  • Development of documentation and training materials and related knowledge management services for operationalizing OpenHIE and its components

  • Key topics that come up frequently include: Hosting (cloud, local ISP, MOH data centers), deployment, interoperability/integration, SOPs, SOA approach, Requirements gathering, sharing experiences from other implementations, how to keep a registry current

Next steps

  • Go to OpenHIE community forum to introduce yourself and your thoughts on priorities for and engagement with OpenHIE from reading this document

  • Look at a list of our SUB and join a call to share your country-project-teams needs and opportunities

Call to Action - How to Engage

All of the dimensions of support described above are fundamental to effective health data sharing planning processes.  In our experience however, countries and individuals who lead within those countries have unique support needs, which necessitates a tailored support strategy.  We appreciate the financial and human resource constraints countries face as they develop their national health data sharing strategies.  As such, we attempt to provide various levels of community-based and individual support services, based upon the evolving needs over time.  Community-based services are by their nature free to the community, and supported by community volunteers who support the values and mission of OpenHIE.   When there’s a need for dedicated, focused, more intensive support, members of the OpenHIE community are available as part of a paid, consultative relationship.

Community-based support services occur through the following methods:

Consulting, support and training services are provided by an ecosystem of organizations, subject matter experts, and teams from around the world. Working with them ensures familiarity with OHIE and use of all OHIEs expertise and experience to support your initiatives success.

Examples of additional services include:

  • In-country direct technical assistance
  • Video conference and/or phone-based assistance
  • Intensive group support intervention during an OpenHIE community events
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.