The Kabarak University center for Health Informatics in conjunction with Google Health and Intellisoft Consulting hosted a series of webinars, bootcamps and a hackathon in June and July 2023 to introduce participants to the Open Health Stack as a set of key concepts and tooling required to build next gen digital health apps.
The Open Health Stack (OHS) has been developed by Google Health as a Digital Public Good to enable developers to build health solutions using Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (HL7 FHIR). The OHS based solutions are designed to be secure, offline-capable, and to provide on-device decision support enabling patient centered care delivery. The OHS suite consists of the Android FHIR SDK, the FHIR Information Gateway and FHIR Data Pipes.
The webinar series provided an opportunity to the over 200 participants to learn about open health standards, the Open Health Stack and the WHO SMART Guidelines from facilitators drawn from Google health, the World Health Organization and Intellisoft Consulting Ltd.
The 2 ½ day bootcamp sessions provided hands on training to the 50+ participants on the use of the OHS Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (HL7 FHIR) that include Android FHIR SDK, the FHIR Information Gateway and FHIR Data Pipes.
A three week hackathon provided an opportunity to the 7 teams that participated to put their skills to practice. A number of products were developed in the areas of immunization tracking, home based medical data collection and access and morbidity records management.
The event series was inspired by the successful use of the OHS in the development of the the Mama’s hub application by a team of researchers from Kabarak University. https://www.kabarak.ac.ke/research-news/mamas-hub-featured-on-google-checkup
The Center for health Informatics will in the coming days offer, in collaboration with the partners, explore more opportunities to participate in creating awareness about open health standards, in contributing towards the development of the WHO smart guidelines as well as promoting the greater adoption of the OHS for the development of solutions in healthcare.
