Abstract
Rwanda, one of the smallest and most densely populated countries in Africa, has made rapid and substantial progress towards designing and deploying a national health information system. One of the more challenging aspects of the system is the design of an architecture to support: interoperability between existing health information systems already in use in the country; incremental extension into a fully integrated national health information system without substantial re-engineering; and scaling, from a single district in the initial phase, to national level without requiring a fundamental change in technology or design paradigm. This paper describes the key requirements and the design of the current architecture using the ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010 standard architecture descriptions. The architecture takes an Enterprise Service Bus approach. A partial implementation and preliminary analysis of the architecture is given. Since these challenges are experienced by other developing African countries, the next steps involves creating a generic architecture that can be reused for health information exchange in other developing African countries.
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Crichton, R., Moodley, D., Pillay, A., Gakuba, R., Seebregts, C.J. (2013). An Architecture and Reference Implementation of an Open Health Information Mediator: Enabling Interoperability in the Rwandan Health Information Exchange. In: Weber, J., Perseil, I. (eds) Foundations of Health Information Engineering and Systems. FHIES 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7789. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39088-3_6
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