DHIS2 Health team joins FAO-led workshop on improving global epidemic intelligence
National and regional stakeholders and global experts worked together on improving One Health and Animal Health surveillance through interoperability, with an emphasis on WHO SMART guidelines and FHIR, and discussions on opportunities for leveraging DHIS2
In April 2024, the DHIS2 Health team took part in a workshop in Rome organized by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) that focused on improving global epidemic intelligence in support of One Health and other collaborative surveillance approaches. This multi-day meeting included participants from WHO, FAO, country- and regional-level stakeholders, and subject matter experts from a number of research organizations from agriculture, science and technology, food safety, zoonotic and infectious disease fields.
The workshop aimed to define a roadmap for improved interoperability among systems within the One Health threat space, which includes human and animal health. Technical discussions emphasized the WHO SMART Guidelines’ operational and machine-readable layers (L2 and L3)exploring methods to support interoperability among widely-used open vocabularies, and assessing the potential of initiating novel FHIR implementation guides within animal health for testing machine-readable recommendations against adopted interoperability standards.
During the workshop, the DHIS2 team presented our work on One Health project, including the Animal Health surveillance use cases that are currently implemented – including real-world examples from Guinea, Zanzibar, and Namibia that will be presented in detail at the 2024 DHIS2 Annual Conference. We also previewed the upcoming DHIS2 Animal Health surveillance toolkit that will be published soon, and shared our experience working with the SMART guidelines, particularly through DAK L2 (for ANC and HIV) and FHIR. We also developed a draft FHIR Implementation Guide (IG) for Animal Health surveillance to showcase how DHIS2 can support this interoperability standard.
We look forward to continuing our collaboration with FAO, WHO and other stakeholders and partners on improving global epidemic intelligence, and facilitating interoperability with DHIS2.
Learn more:
- DHIS2 Health Data Toolkit: dhis2.org/health-data-toolkit
- DHIS2 support for FHIR: dhis2.org/integration/fhir
