Making Data Interoperability Easier for LMICs — OpenFn
Does your organisation have a bunch of different data tools and systems that need to share data with each other easily? Have you ever wondered how you can automate and integrate these critical systems? OpenFn helps health and humanitarian organisations in more than 40 countries automate key processes and integrate critical systems, so they spend less time managing data and more time focusing on their work.
This easy to use IT platform is designed to help IT staff and systems administrators spend less time combining and cleaning data manually, reducing costs while also improving speed and quality.
Free Webinar on April 8th, 2021 10am Eastern
Join us on April 8th, 10am Eastern, when FCDO’s COVIDaction team will host OpenFn’s Head of Product, Taylor Downs, for a technical demonstration of the OpenFn integration platform. This webinar is intended for IT staff and technologists who are looking for a concrete set of tools to make automation of system integration easier and faster.
👉Register your interest in attending here: Registration Form
In less than 30 minutes, Taylor will show you how to set-up an OpenFn project that receives KoboToolbox submissions in real-time and uses these submissions to
(1) create tracked entity instances in DHIS2,
(2) add contacts in Salesforce, and
(3) insert new rows in a Google Sheets workbook.
We’ll then have 30 minutes for Q&A and a technical deep dive for those interested in learning about the various setup, SaaS, and local deployment options available on OpenFn.
Data Silos as a Key Barrier to Data Usage
There has been an explosion of investments in health data collection and management systems by Ministries of Health and iNGOs, especially in rapid response situations. Different projects may need different types of tools and platforms to collect and manage their own data.
Unfortunately, most of these data systems are siloed, making it difficult to combine and use the data holistically. The main way to combine and share this data is to export it into Excel, and then manually combine and cross-walk the data until it is in a usable state — a labor intensive and slow process.
Especially faced with multi-faceted crises such as COVID-19, being able to get access to this data quickly and sustainably will make the response more impactful and less costly.
OpenFn as an Easy to Use Integration Platform
OpenFn is an open-core data integration platform that helps health and humanitarian organisations automate key processes and connect critical systems, so they spend less time managing data and more time focusing on their work.
Organisations can use OpenFn/platform as a secure, hosted web application with a free-forever tier, and then either choose to scale up in the cloud or deploy the jobs they’ve built with OpenFn’s suite of open-source data integration tools, like OpenFn/engine or OpenFn/devtools, to run them locally.
This flexibility allows for rapid prototyping, or even sustained sandbox implementations for testing changes to integration flows before ultimately keeping all sensitive data on local servers with free-and-open-source (FOSS) software.
Selected as a COVIDaction Data Challenge Grantee
The COVIDAction Data Challenge selected OpenFN as one of our grantees, as we saw this functionality and approach as a key offering to many Ministries Health Informatics teams and non-profits. Many health ministries have limited teams who need to manage multiple systems quickly; they also are often cash limited and unable to pay licensing fees.
In coordination with DIAL’s support for the Open Source version of OpenFn, COVIDaction supported ease of migration from the rapid prototyping on the free tier to an open source deployment. COVIDaction has also been supporting OpenFn on the development of their sustainability platform.
OpenFn Providing Interconnection in 43 Countries
Prioritising security, stability, and scalability, OpenFn systems have provided the “plumbing” behind interventions spreading across 43 different countries, delivered by organisations such as UNICEF, the IRC, Population Council, the SwissTPH, PSI, Miracle Feet, Lwala Community Health Alliance and more.
In Western Kenya, the OpenFn platform drives for near-real time two-way communication between a cloud-based management system and teams of community health workers for Lwala (lwala.org). When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, Lwala could respond rapidly by reconfiguring the data flows on their OpenFn implementation to ensure that new COVID-related visit and care data fit seamlessly into their existing systems. Because OpenFn connects with the most common tools used in ICT4D and high-security-risk, custom government systems, implementations are being planned to support ministries of health across sub-Saharan African to provide the crucial link between field-level, disease surveillance tools (ODK, Kobo Toolbox, CommCare, etc.) and national-level public health information systems such as DHIS2.
The diagram above illustrates how six commonly used technologies across public health programmes might be configured to work together using OpenFn. New COVID-19 cases being registered on a mobile phone may trigger a whole set of updates, notifications and workflows: indicator reports might be submitted, payments sent, and supply shipments requested. Using OpenFn, these actions are automated, enabling interoperability between the different systems and user groups collaborating on a public health intervention.
To learn more, visit www.openfn.org and docs.openfn.org or reach out to the team at support@openfn.org.
About the FCDO COVIDaction Data Challenge
The Data Challenge is part of the COVIDaction programme, funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO) across key thematic areas of oxygen, data, resilient health, and local production. The programme is a partnership between the UK FCDO’s Frontier Technology Hub, Global Disability Innovation Hub (GDI Hub), UCL Institute of Healthcare Engineering, along with other collaborators.
