Ministries of Health in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMIC) are making or trying to make public health decisions for infectious disease conditions like HIV using data garnered from sentinel events and disease tracking in the community. The process of gathering and aggregating data for these case-based reports for is, in all too often a cumbersome or paper-based process. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) was interested in prototyping and piloting approaches that could improve the efficiency and reliability of case reports in resource-constrained environments. One of their primary goals was to demonstrate how electronic data gathered in the front lines of care could be leveraged to automate and improve the reliability of data within case reports driving public health decisions at regional and country levels. OpenMRS is an open source medical record system platform often used in resource constrained environments. Since OpenMRS is used as an electronic medical record system in several African countries and has been connected to regional or country-level health exchanges, the CDC was interested in building a working solution for electronic case based reporting using OpenMRS and a health information exchange.
Objective:
We demonstrate an architecture for driving regional public health decisions with automated and semi-automated data collected from open source point of care systems in resource constrained environments.