GeoPrism® Registry (GeoPrism) is a Common Geo-Registry[1] (CGR) implementation that has recently added support for FHIR with the goal of creating semantic standards for common geographies and hierarchies for Instant OpenHIE. Just as a terminology service can standardize vocabularies for interoperability, a CGR standardizes location identity, classification, geometries, and how locations are used in multiple and interrelated hierarchies. By using common geographies, OpenHIE components will be able to integrate data by location and for the correct periods of time. This enables the possibility to perform trend analysis. Additionally, these components will not need to conform to the hierarchy structure of a single system, such as an instance of DHIS2. Rather, GeoPrism can track different hierarchies used by multiple systems and how they relate to each other. For example, the facility registry can have different levels in its hierarchy than an instance of DHIS2, and yet GeoPirsm can facilitate synchronization of health facilities between the two systems for the correct operational and administrative boundaries. This goes beyond the capabilities of the Global Open Facility Registry (GOFR) Facility Match tool developed by IntraHealth, which focuses on reconciling facility lists maintained by multiple sources and does not model the time component.

Investment from this grant will provide a reference implementation for how Instant OpenHIE components can integrate data by common geographies starting with the GOFR, but eventually any component that has support for the FHIR mobile care service delivery (mCSD) standard. Although GeoPrism can facilitate interoperability by normalizing geographies across existing systems, less integration effort is needed when OpenHIE components use common geographies from a CGR when they are initially implemented. Even if a country initially deploys only one component, integrating additional components later will be easier, as these systems start off by using a semantic standard for geographies. Since GeoPrism is feature complete, funds will be used to make GeoPrism and its integration with the OpenHIE Architecture to support GOFR with common geographies shelf ready to minimize implementation effort needed by local teams. To that end, we will integrate GeoPrism with the Open Health Information Mediator (OpenHIM) and adapt the containerization deployment according to the OpenHIE DevOps guidelines. Additionally, effort will be spent on developer documentation so that this reference approach can be duplicated by local teams with other components that support an integration with FHIR/mCSD for location data. This will be facilitated by creating a testing framework with test cases, an automated test suite, and extensive test data. We also suggest funds be used to create an integration with OpenStreetMap (OSM) so that the administrative hierarchy and boundaries defined there could easily be utilized for any country as a convenient starting point. Although in a production environment it is best it to obtain such data from an authoritative source, using OSM would be a convenient way to provide data for demonstration, development, and testing purposes.