[FOSS_health] Interoperability - GK3 Panel Session

[Molly Cheah]

Dear all,

As a follow-up of the discussion on interoperability and Lee Seldon's 
summary, those who attended the OSHCA conference in KL in May will 
remember that OSHCA had submitted a proposal to present at a panel 
session "ICTs and Health" at GK3 in KL in December 2007. The session 
title may be modified to make it sound more attractive. See 
http://www.globalknowledge.org/gkps_portal/index.cfm?&menuid=627&parentid=676

OSHCA's submission had to go through IDRC as a partner because OSHCA is 
not a member of Globalknowledge.org. Recent update from IDRC is that 
OSHCA's submission had been merged with IDRC's own submission to become 
a panel session on the main conference to be restructured and renamed.

The original submissions are as follows:

Session Summary from OSHCA:*
*

"Open Source Health Care Alliance (OSHCA) believes that Free/Open Source 
Health Care Software will provide a viable and sustainable alternative 
in mainstream Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for 
positive impact in health outcomes as adjunct to building a global 
knowledge society. Ability to share data in healthcare provides the 
greatest potential for such impact. The need for interoperability, open 
standards and data exchange in FOSS technology is felt most in the 
developing world. Many FOSS applications in healthcare have in fact been 
developed in relative isolation from each other. Notwithstanding their 
commitment to being open and standards compliant, there currently is no 
“forum” and facility to test and develop interoperability among FOSS 
health applications. Hence its crucial that these issues are addressed 
if moving the FOSS agenda for health especially in developing countries 
is to become a reality."


Session Summary from IDRC:
"This panel discussion will focus on numerous issues related to the 
usefulness of ICTs in relation to health outcomes. It will explore the 
different experiences various partners have had with using ICT-enabled 
health applications in developing countries. Amongst the key areas the 
panel will focus on, special attention will be placed on ICT 
interventions in the area of prevention, administration, clinical uses, 
education and research. More specifically, panelists will describe how 
ICTs can prevent the spread of diseases, improve the efficiency of 
health systems and make treatments more effective."

Unfortunately, time is not on our side for refining these changes but I 
have communicated with IDRC that it is agreeable that the amended 
approaches for the GK3 panel should be seen seamlessly and to go beyond 
individual applications. IDRC has earmarked the presentation of the 
PANACeA project and OpenMRS at GK3. For us on this mailing list the 
discussions had gone beyond how to have interoperability to work but 
actually planning to test such interoperability concepts in real 
locations and we already have a summary of the discussions from Lee 
Seldon posted here.

For the GK3 presentation amended proposal, in addition to presenting 
issues on using open standards to address interoperability and therefore 
enabling data exchange, we should be able to put together several 
examples of interoperability initiatives among FOSS health applications 
for the actual presentation in December. Discussions to be included 
should also evolve around the different types/levels of interoperability 
and whether its sufficient to have "functional" interoperability and the 
use of specific message format for communications. In discussing 
options, it may be necessary to touch on how interoperability works, 
features, how to implement, standards compliance, advantages, 
disadvantages etc.

I hope these ideas may be considered for the merged proposal texts but 
if any of you would like to express further views, please express them 
here on this list so that I can include them in my responses to IDRC.

Rgds,
Molly