Background

‍ICAP Ethiopia, in collaboration with CDC set out to develop and implement Ethiohri (Ethiopia’s OpenMRS HIV Reference Implementation). This system enhances HIV care management across Ethiopia’s health facilities, providing a critical tool to support the country’s health goals, including achieving UNAIDS 95-95-95 targets.

However, a key challenge was integrating Ethiohri, installed at health facilities, with two vital national systems: Viral Load (VL), the national LIMS, and REDCap, the national system for HIV data capture and case surveillance. These integrations needed to ensure real-time, efficient data exchange between multiple Ethiohri instances at the facilities and these national systems accessible online.

Challenge

‍ICAP Ethiopia needed to ensure that lab test orders, lab results, and patient encounter data could flow smoothly between the many instances of Ethiohri and the centralized VL and REDCap systems. This meant facilitating real-time data exchange without creating extra work for the healthcare workers or compromising the quality and timeliness of the data.

Solution: Seamless Integration Using Ozone IOL

‍Ozone’s Interoperability Layer (IOL) has been the key to solving these challenges. By leveraging Ozone IOL, ICAP Ethiopia achieved seamless integration between Ethiohri, the Viral Load system, and REDCap all using FHIR resources for data exchange.

With Ozone IOL, lab test orders from each Ethiohri instance were seamlessly sent to the national Viral Load system. It also facilitated polling for lab results, ensuring that test outcomes were promptly sent back from the VL system to each Ethiohri facility instance. This eliminated the need for manual data transfers and provided a fully automated workflow between the facility-based Ethiohri and the national LIMS.

Similarly, integration with REDCap allowed for all HIV encounters recorded in Ethiohri to be automatically sent to the national REDCap system over FHIR. This enabled centralized data collection and case surveillance across all facilities running Ethiohri, providing national stakeholders with timely and reliable insights into patient care.

Take-away: Ozone IOL Ease of Use and Efficiency

‍One of the standout aspects of using Ozone IOL was the ease of implementation. Leveraging the Ozone platform, the technical integration of these systems was seamless, allowing ICAP Ethiopia to achieve the necessary connections and workflows within just one week during a targeted hackathon. This rapid development timeline highlighted Ozone’s flexibility, readiness and power, simplifying what would otherwise have been a complex, time-consuming process.