An interoperability architecture for the health information exchange in Rwanda

Abstract

Rwanda, one of the smallest and most densely populated countries in Africa, has made rapid and substantial progress towards designing and deploying a national health information system. One of the challenging aspects of the system is the design of an architecture to support: interoperability between existing health information systems already in use in the country; incremental extension into a fully integrated national health information system without substantial reengineering; and scaling, from a single district in the initial phase, to national level without requiring a fundamental change in technology or design paradigm. This paper describes the key requirements and the design of the current architecture using ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010 standard architecture descriptions. The architecture is based on the Enterprise Service Bus architectural model. We also describe a partial implementation of the architecture, and give a preliminary analysis based on our experiences.