We recently formalized partnership agreements with AeHIN (Asia eHealth Information Network), and RECAINSA, the Central American Health Informatics Network. The OpenHIE community is very excited to move forward this collaborative process with both AeHIN and RECAINSA to better engage with regions in South and Central Americas and Southeast Asia.
Thinking Global and Expanding Engagement
OpenHIE was born in Africa and has seen great uptake in various African regions. Through these partnerships, we are strengthening our ability to facilitate growth and progress in AeHIN countries and future spread of concepts to South and Central America. The OpenHIE mission is to improve health outcomes for resource emerging communities. These exist all across the world, not exclusively in the areas we are currently practicing. The South and Central Americas and Southeast Asia regions are important constituencies that are under-represented in our current community process. OpenHIE aims to respond to real country needs and through our partnerships with these networks we will be able to expand our knowledge around regional needs in these resource-emerging environments.
OpenHIE should be available to any environment that experiences these resource constraints. – Paul Biondich
One of the biggest barriers for OpenHIE to engage with the Central and South America region has been that our implementation materials are presented in the English language. We realize the importance of offering technical materials in appropriate languages and are striving to translate materials to support all implementers as well as support our extensive community of subject matter experts to provide educational webinars in Spanish and other languages.
Formalizing Partnerships
In collaboration with AeHIN and RECAINSA, we have laid out what our partnership will look like, including support in sharing the OpenHIE architecture, training, and implementation assets. Examples of these are the efforts being made with translations from the RECAINSA team and the capacity-building work from AeHIN and the labs they support.
AeHIN has always recognized the potential of OpenHIE in improving interoperability as far back as our second general meeting in Manila in 2013. OpenHIE has been a regular session in our meetings since then and as we now plan for our eighth conference in 2022. We look forward to contributing to the OpenHIE Community of Practice. – Dr. Alvin Marcelo, AeHIN Executive Director
We are very excited for the upcoming collaborative work with teams that align with our values and mission and also have common perspectives around the way countries support themselves in communities of practice.
Latin America is taking important steps in adopting digital health strategies to improve healthcare delivery. There are many challenges in digital transformation and a holistic approach that goes beyond the use of digital tools is required to achieve transformation. The approach needs to include strong health data governance and interoperability between different stakeholders. – Daniel Otzoy, RECAINSA Executive Director.
Working Together
Over the next few months, we’re ready to begin down the path of working on projects with RECAINSA and AeHIN from sharing the OpenHIE architecture, training, and implementation assets to their team contributing to our peer-learning community and communication networks.
If you’re interested in finding ways you can support and follow the efforts we’ve laid out for these collaborations, check out the translation process, keep an eye out on the Academy capacity-building initiative, and stay tuned for updates shared on the community forum!