New Digital Group Offers Full Range of Digital Health Services

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In winter 2019, the International Training and Education Center for Health (I-TECH) launched a new unit: the Digital Initiatives Group at I-TECH (DIGI). The DIGI team builds upon 15 years of experience at I-TECH designing, developing, implementing, and evaluating health information systems (HIS) around the world.

The group — co-led by Dr. Nancy Puttkammer, Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Health, and Jan Flowers, Clinical Faculty and Director of Global Health Informatics in the Clinical Research Group (CRIG) — provides services to help programs scope and build technical solutions to manage program or clinical data.

“The shared faculty lead role helps the group leverage diverse resources from departments across the university,” said Joanna Diallo, DIGI Managing Director.

By promoting open-source “global goods” that are supported by implementer communities, DIGI helps partners such as Ministries of Health to be able to own and continue to develop long-term solutions.

In April, Flowers received a Digital Square award to lead an online community of practice on open-source lab information systems like OpenELIS, and Dr. Puttkammer received a Digital Square award to design and test practical and generalizable solutions for interoperability between OpenELIS and two other leading open source tools: OpenMRS and OpenLMIS.

DIGI partners with global communities to develop and enhance digital tools and provide technical assistance for effective implementation and sustainability. The team works closely with on-the-ground experts and stakeholders to guide and facilitate governance, capacity building, and continuous quality improvement using a maturity model lens.

DIGI works in the following technical areas:

  • Software Design & Development
  • Health Data Exchange Standards
  • Health Systems Architecture
  • Information Security
  • Evidence-Based Evaluation and Implementation
  • Digital Health Workforce Development

“With investment from the I-TECH center to launch DIGI, we have been able to approach the work in a new way that is flexible and responsive and promotes cross project sharing,” explained Dr. Puttkammer. “We hope this will continue to strengthen the department’s standing as a leader in digital health.”

DIGI Utilizing Digital SquareDIGI With I-TECH @ UW

OpenELIS Global Selected for Google’s Innovative Season of Docs Program

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DIGI Utilizing Digital Square

DIGI Utilizing Digital Square

Google has selected OpenELIS Global, a laboratory information system stewarded by the Digital Initiatives Group at I-TECH (DIGI), as a participant in the first year of its Season of Docs, a unique program that pairs technical writers with real-world open source projects. DIGI implements OpenELIS Global in Côte d’Ivoire and Haiti and manages contributions to the software as a part of the global developer community.

“We rely on talented contributors from the global health software community to ensure that our tools have the biggest impact and are available to the widest audience possible,” explained Casey Iiams-Hauser, Senior Digital Health Specialist with DIGI and the OpenELIS Global Product Owner. “By being transparent about our challenges and triumphs, we benefit from peer-to-peer sharing to problem solve for the benefit of the whole community.”

Technical writer Areesha Tariq was paired with the OpenELIS Global project as a part of the initiative. Based in Islamabad, Pakistan, Areesha has a background in software engineering and her writing focuses predominantly on user guides. She will work to improve OpenELIS Global end-user documentation by turning the current user manual into more pragmatic and accessible job aids.

Areesha is excited to join the team, saying, “I feel great to be selected as the technical writer for OpenELIS Global. It will be a new learning experience to work in an open-source community. I hope that I will be able to complete the project and continue working with the team so that I can contribute to a global cause.”

By participating in Google’s Season of Docs initiative, DIGI will not only benefit from Areesha’s contributions, it will also have the opportunity to increase awareness of OpenELIS Global in the global community by having our projects posted to the initiatives website and reviewed by a large number of technical writers, open source organizations, and contributors. “We are excited to be a part of Season of Docs,” said DIGI Managing Director, Joanna Diallo. “During the application process we met a number of highly qualified technical writers and observed a lot of interest in ‘global goods’ like OpenELIS.”

The idea for DIGI’s technical documentation project grew out of a proposal to PATH’s Digital Square project, which like Google’s Season of Docs, invests in critical technology that can be accessed worldwide. DIGI’s proposal was only partially funded by Digital Square to develop practical designs and generalizable approaches to achieve interoperability among open-source, clinic-level data management systems via the OpenHIE framework. These systems include OpenELIS Global; OpenLMIS, a laboratory management information system; and OpenMRS, an electronic medical records (EMR) system. However, the OpenELIS Global documentation scope of work remained unfunded.

“Having focused our thinking already on OpenELIS Globaldocumentation gaps for the Digital Square application allowed us to pull together our Season of Docs application quickly,” explained Diallo. “It was fortuitous timing – and it is inspiring to see both PATH and Google investing in open source organizations.”