Notice C

Promoting the collaborative development of proposals for investments in digital health global goods

DHIS2 as an analytics, reporting and visualization solution for OpenIMIS

Submitted by Harsh Atal on Fri, 07/20/2018 - 04:10 Last revised by Digital Square on Mon, 04/15/2019 - 05:59.
Notice C Opportunity: 
Announcement C1: Modular transformation of openIMIS
Application Status: 
Pending Review & Investment

Comments

Nils Kaiser - Fri, 07/20/2018 - 10:01

Hi Harsh, 

Which DHIS2 building blocks do you forsee to implement OpenIMIS?

How would you plan to distribute the OpenIMIS-on-DHIS2 system to existing DHIS2 instances?

If a DHIS2 instances with the OpenIMIS configuration have been used in production (contains live data) and customized (for example additional fields), how would you keep that system updated if a new OpenIMIS-on-DHIS2 version is released?

Cheers!

Harsh Atal - Sun, 07/22/2018 - 23:49

Hi Nils

Thanks for the reply, these are all excellent questions.

We forsee a standard set of metadata configuration which can be imported/exported to other instances. This metadata will obviously involve a collection of data elements, attributes, organisationunits , programs etc. We propose that through our interaction with the GIZ/Swizz TPH and partners we will arrive at a common set of metadata configuration which serves as a starting building block for new instances.

Having such a configuration makes it possible to transfer it to other dhis2 instances, any external apps can also be plugged into the DHIS2 instance this converting it to a OpenIMIS-DHIS2 instance.

We are not planning to change the core DHIS2 unless there is no option left, this making the transition from one version to other smooth and not requiring developers, but even in case such a change has been done, we can keep a seperate branch of OpenIMIS-DHIS2 which is maintained by us and the OpenIMIS community in the long run and updated / fixes etc can be acquired from that.

Let me know if you need further clarifications!

 

Thanks

harsh

Anonymous - Mon, 08/20/2018 - 11:02

Hi Harsh,

It looks like openIMIS is currently heading towards a rearchitecture to a more modern tech stack instead of a rewrite using DHIS2. However, there are interesting usecases of leveraging the flexibility of DHIS2 for reporting and visualising key indicators - i.e. using DHIS2 as an analytics / reporting / visualisation platform

It would be interesting to hear your thoughts on that.

Cheers,

Nils

Anonymous - Tue, 08/21/2018 - 01:00

Hi Nils

Yes, using DHIS2 as a dashboarding and reporting platform is gaining in popularity due to flexibility of configuration and scope for making customized reports and dashboards. Although there is an extra step of getting all the data into the system since data is captured elsewhere and has to be imported into DHIS2. 

We have done such integrations where the data gets synced with DHIS2 through backend service and the users extract/view the data on the dhis2 side. One such intergation was with the ODK platform, where the data from the ODK was fetched nightly into DHIS2 for analysis/reporting purposes.

There are several ways to do such integrations API, database level, excel imports and the method of choice depends on the nature of the applications , hardware resources and manpower available. 

With OpenIMIS, the key indicators once identified can be configured into DHIS2 and the raw data can be imported on a daily bases or a agreed upon frequency of time, although this means that multiiple systems are operational at the same time and maintainance of both can be a challenge but a complex system like this should not shy away from such a approach as well since there are obvious benefits of using a proven tool in the same domain.

Thanks

harsh