New IHE work item: supporting WHO's COVID-19 aggregate reporting

Hi all -- as I'm sure many of you are aware -- we in the digital health community have a hugely important role to play in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. Every day, our newscasts and social media feeds are full of the latest pandemic-related data and statistics. Can you even imagine what it would be like to try to battle this public health emergency without data? In many low and middle income countries (LMIC) -- that's not a rhetorical question!

The WHO has released a normative COVID-19 case reporting form . Almost immediately after the pandemic was announced, the software dev team behind an open source health management information system (HMIS), DHIS2 , got to work. They quickly released an add-on module that would allow LMIC ministries of health (MOH) to leverage the DHIS2 platform, which is adopted in more than 70 LMICs, to capture COVID-19 case information.

The members of the DHIS2 team, which is based at the University of Oslo, are longtime collaborators with IHE's Quality, Research and Public Health (QRPH) technical committee. The DHIS2 platform has adopted and operationalized a number of IHE Profiles, including the Aggregate Data Exchange ( ADX ) profile which it natively supports. The ADX profile defines a normative grammar to be used by point of service applications (such as mHealth apps, or EMRs) to submit reportable indicators to an HMIS. Content specifications can be defined using the ADX gramamar. As an example, the US government's PEPFAR programme , with leadership from the CDC, supported development of an ADX for HIV content profile to support standards-based reporting of HIV indicators.

To help LMICs fight COVID-19, the QRPH technical committee launched a fast-track work item during last Thursday's weekly call. This work item is focused on rapidly developing and releasing an ADX for COVID-19 content specification. This will be immediately useful to countries that have implemented electronic case reporting applications (such as the 50 LMICs that have deployed DHIS2's COVID-19 Tracker , for example). By leveraging this new spec, any standards-conformant eCase Reporting application will be able to submit standards-conformant COVID-19 indicators to an HMIS.

This is important work and we should all be proud to see our IHE community moving it forward. Canada is blessed with data analyses that we use, every day, to help us fight COVID-19. This WHO-based, LMIC-focused work item will help our public health colleagues in low-resource settings more successfully address their pandemic spread and plank their curves. This is a worthwhile effort. If COVID-19 has taught us anything... it's that we're all in this together!

Stay well, everyone.
Derek