Enabling Semantic Interoperability of Crowdsourced Disease Surveillance Data for Namibia Through a Health-Standards-Based Approach

The government of Namibia has invested significantly in Health Information Systems (HIS) for the purposes of quality healthcare. Despite the huge investment in HIS in the Namibian health sector, the challenge of interoperability remains a problem due to the fact that the silo HIS in the Namibian health environment are not integrated in order to exchange and communicate disease surveillance data with each other. The challenge is the HIS are heterogeneous systems with unstructured data, different data formats, developed by different vendors and are running on different software. One source of disease surveillance data is provided by communities in a phenomenon normally referred to as crowdsourcing. As a result, the objective of this study was to develop a prototype that allows crowdsource users to utilise their mobile devices to access, exchange and communicate disease surveillance data in real time directly to the District Health Information Systems (DHIS-2) in regional offices and the national office of the Ministry of Health and Social Services (MoHSS) in Namibia for semantic interoperability. The current method used for communicating disease surveillance information between the MoHSS, and its agency, the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) and public health institutions is a manual system which is not appropriate as it causes delays in the exchange of information among them. The prototype is grounded on health standards, such as Health Level Seven (HL7), and Integrated Health Exchange (IHE).