One of OpenHIE’s core values is sharing our work with our growing community. Over the past decade, the community’s architecture has helped improve global health and patient outcomes by streamlining health information systems. With sharing these stories of impact, we aim to highlight the unique ways that countries and technical teams have put the OpenHIE architecture into practice to create interoperable solutions for their healthcare needs.
So, what is an Impact Story?
At OpenHIE, impact stories provide real life examples of communities that OpenHIE has worked in by showcasing the hard work that’s gone towards solving the problem that country faced. Whether that’s improving immunization service delivery in Tanzania and Zambia or building a facility registry in Ethiopia, each impact story is important to the OpenHIE team as it shows how the architecture specifically caters to the needs of each community. The OpenHIE community hopes these stories are helpful to teams with unmet needs who wish to see how other different countries and implementation teams have utilized the architecture and how they can use those takeaways in their own environment.
Importance of Sharing Projects
We believe that sharing our impact stories and projects is crucial to furthering our vision to empower countries to measurably improve health outcomes. By publishing our impact, it allows the community members to support their environments that need health information exchange solutions by utilizing past implementations; their lessons learnt and best practice recommendations.
How Are Impact Stories Created?
There are many avenues to take an implementation and turn it into an impact story on the OpenHIE website. The OpenHIE secretariat team strives to meet community members to obtain more details on a story. Whether that be via email, in a meeting, or by submitting a form.
For a presentation on a Facility Registry call in April 2021, Nebyou Azanew presented on Ethiopia’s Experience in Implementing an MFR. Nebyou was invited to participate in this call so that OpenHIE could learn more about this implementation and to use these details in creating an Impact Story. From there, the story was drafted and the secretariat team worked directly with Nebyou to ensure the story was accurate and told a story in a similar way as to what he shared before publishing it as an Impact Story.
In other cases, community members share their stories directly with the team either through an email with a draft prepared or by submitting a response to our Impact Story questionnaire. The story on OpenHIE Academy in Ethiopia was submitted to this team by Haftamu Kebede as a result of a conversation during the 2021 Architecture Summit. Bwighane Mwalwanda submitted the questionnaire in order to publish the story, Aggregating Fragmented Health Data in Malawi. While these are some of the common ways we continue to create Impact Stories, there are so many other avenues to get your stories out there!
If you’d like to share or you know of an impact story, please fill out this questionnaire or fill out this contact form to connect with the OpenHIE Secretariat team on how you’d like to share more details.