The introduction of electronic health information systems into health services in most developing countries has been driven by donors looking
to capture data about specific health issues (i.e. HIV/AIDS and TB) for research or impact monitoring and evaluation purposes. Data
requirements have been illness specific and the electronic systems stand alone. The result has been the growing problem of siloed health
information limited by the nature of the data collected and stored within the system as well as project specific access rights. This has led to
valuable, even critical information not being shared between healthcare providers and results in reduced effectiveness, more inefficiencies and
increased costs for health services in low resource settings already stretched by limited human resources for health and funding. If accurate and
timely health data could be shared more easily and more widely, this data would be profoundly more useful.
Electronic system interoperability addresses this by enabling existing health information systems to exchange data, sharing important
information between hospitals, laboratories, pharmacies, clinicians, healthcare workers and patients. There are other existing interoperability
solutions available, but these are often difficult to implement and use, requiring highly-skilled technical personnel and specialist knowledge of
data exchange standards to implement and manage. The Open Health information Mediator (OpenHIM ) provides an interoperability
solution that makes it as easy as possible to connect systems and exchange relevant data, whilst ensuring security and privacy. The OpenHIM is
a an existing open source middleware used to enable interoperability between component health information systems, either individually or as
part of a health information exchange (HIE). It is currently one of the reference technologies for the interoperability layer of the Open Health
Information Exchange (OpenHIE) community project. According to the Global Goods Maturity Model, the OpenHIM rating is Medium for
all three core areas: global utility, community support and software maturity.
The goals of this project are to (i) continue to harden the OpenHIM to make it a more robust and easy to implement and maintain for the
growing number of implementers in Africa and other low resource countries,; (ii) grow the community of developers and implementers to
ensure that the OpenHIM meets the needs of those on the ground.