A Standards-Based Open Source Application to Gather Health Assessment Data in Developing Countries

Many organizations are working in developing countries to support local health care organizations and infrastructure to provide sustainable, community-based health care. This requires not only the influx of medical staff and supplies, but also requires maintaining individual health care records and enabling the ability to collect, analyze and aggregate data in the field to customize care to the local needs of the community, and to provide continuity of care to its citizens. The recent rise of adoption of standards for electronic health records (EHR) provides an alternative to using paper forms in mobile health clinics that often serve these countries. In this paper, we describe an open-source, standards-based health assessment software application developed by the non-profit organization Health Records For Everyone (HR4E) and field tested in a mobile health clinic in rural Ethiopia in the fall of 2011. The application allows mobile health clinic staff to quickly deploy medical clinics and collect patient data electronically in the face of various environmental challenges. In addition to producing electronic patient records which are validated in-field using HL7's Clinical Document Architecture standard, the application allows medical practitioners to view and summarize patient data for in-field analysis.