Welcome to our IOL community

The OpenHIE Interoperability Layer Community (OHIE-IOL) aims to enable easier interoperability between Health Information Systems by providing a forum for discussion and knowledge sharing and by designing and developing an interoperability layer that connects the components within the OHIE. 

We envision a world in which the timely exchange of health information improves health outcomes and saves lives.

Our mission is to build and sustain an open community to discuss the challenges of interoperability between health information systems, as well as to design an architecture and develop a reference software application to enable easier interoperability between disparate health systems and components. We promote the use of appropriate standards to support best practices for health data exchange.

Our values

  • We hold the needs of our target community of users as our primary concern
  • We are an open and collaborative community, valuing the inputs and respecting the contributions of every member
  • We strive for elegantly simple solutions to complex problems
  • We use the “adopt, adapt, develop” approach to inform our decision-making process for standards and technology
  • We aim for ease of use to reduce barriers to adoption, especially in low-resource settings
  • We are implementation-driven in our designs and requirements, valuing practical solutions to real problems and real needs 

What is an Interoperability Layer?

An interoperability layer is a system that enables easier interoperability between disparate information systems by connecting all of the infrastructure services and client applications together. In the OpenHIE context, these systems are Health Information Systems (HISs) such as a client registry, provider registry, facility registry, shared health record and terminology service.   An interoperability layer receives transactions from client systems, coordinates interaction between components of the HIE and provides common core functions to simplify the interoperability between systems.  

The interoperability layer developed by this community is the OpenHIM (Open Health Information Mediator),an open-source middleware system based on an ESB architecture and currently implemented in Rwanda as part of the RHIE. More details about this tool are available at openhim.org  and the code is available on Github.  Plans for current development activities can be seen on the technical development roadmap and all the supporting technical documentation can be found here.

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