Notice C

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

Escrowed data retention and retrieval solution for digital health application platforms based on distributed blockchain technology starting with DHIS2

Notice C Opportunity: 
Announcement C0: Global Good Software Development and Support
Application Status: 
In Scope

Comments

Thank you for your concept note and we are looking forward to the full proposal.  I encourage you to specifically outline the documentation outputs in the full proposal, particularly as blockchain is of interest to the larger DH community. You also mention this is part of a larger project in which some funding is outside the request to Digital Square.  Detail those linkages and address sustainability in your full proposal. Finally, it is unclear what datasets you may be working with to test and develop the MVP.  Please explain what data you intend to work with and if you have any ongoing collaboration with eisting DHIS2 users/Ministries of Health, that you plan to leverage as part of this project.

DHIS2 has just started making use of Kafka - this may likely be a good place for monitoring transactional changes to DHIS2 Aggregate and DHIS2 Tracker. Also, there is a DHIS2 FHIR proposal https://proposals.digitalsquare.io/50 and there may be more utility to looking at building out a block-chain infrastructure based on transactions in a FHIR data store rather than limiting to DHIS2.

There may already be some existing projects in the FHIR world that are exploring this. Can you comment on the use of alternatives to 'proof-of-work' that will be considered (e.g. proof-of-stake) to ensure that we are not inadvertenly adding unnecessary energy demands. The proposal https://proposals.digitalsquare.io/75 is in a similar theme - we would recommend that the proposals be combined with different work packages to for the various activities.

Good concept note. Are participants constrained to use dhis2 or can any entity simply join the network and use it for exchanging health data? The latter is more inclusive (and the more health applications the better). If the latter, we would consider participating as a node and our health need is to exchange health insurance claims. Another ouroose is to store business logic (eg, females can have orostatectomies and males can't get pregnant, etc)...