Global good partners in profile: Daniel Futerman, Jembi Health Systems
Each quarter, Digital Square shines the spotlight on global goods and innovators in our community through our Global Goods Community Newsletter. This interview was first shared in May 2019.
Daniel Futerman is a Senior Program Manager at Jembi Health Systems.
What excites you about the digital health space?
The potential for digital health to improve and strengthen health systems is what excites me the most. With a growing and engaged global community striving to demonstrate this potential, one can’t help but stay inspired working in this space.
It’s exciting to see how the field of digital health has evolved over the past decade, with new digital innovations and trends being applied to health, along with a concerted shift from isolated, siloed projects towards a more holistic approach to building out digital health ecosystems, and looking beyond technology to address the people, policy and processes required to scale digital health initiatives. We’re seeing the formation of new communities of practice, more organisational collaboration and coordination of efforts, and principled approaches to digital health development, implementation and investment. It’s also great to see increasing interest in the adoption and adaption of integrated and interoperable digital health solutions, with growing evidence and testimony to support the impact these initiatives can have on quality of care and decision-making at local, national, and global levels. Overall, this is an exciting and rewarding space to work in with a real sense of community and purpose.
How is OpenHIM evolving with support from Digital Square?
Digital Square’s global good investments are helping to ensure that today's digital health technologies are able to meet the needs of tomorrow. In the case of the OpenHIM, this means support for strengthening, optimising, and extending the core application to provide a more stable and robust platform for the next set of implementations and solutions built around the OpenHIM. The OpenHIM is designed to enable data exchange and interoperability between disparate information systems, connecting infrastructure services and client applications within a Health Information Exchange (HIE) through a centrally managed space. Digital Square’s investment in the OpenHIM will ensure that the application is able to support the needs of a modern HIE through extended support for message transport protocols, improved message handling and streaming, and enabling implementers to rapidly configure and deploy mediator services that provide message transformation and orchestration capabilities for the exchange of data in different formats and across various HIE workflows. In addition to technical development, Digital Square’s investment is focused on the productisation of the OpenHIM through development of a product roadmap, user documentation, and improved communications and community engagement strategy.
Where do you think countries will be in five years in terms of their HIS implementation?
While each country will face its own unique set of challenges in scaling up HIS implementation, increasing attention to establishing national digital health systems means that in five years, many countries are likely to be making major strides towards the establishment and roll out of integrated HIS solutions and interoperable digital health platforms that support better management, use and dissemination of data. A critical determinant of success for scaling a country’s HIS implementation(s) will be the development of frameworks and roadmaps for establishing national digital health systems through strategic planning, to institute artefacts such as a national digital health strategy and investment plan, and frameworks for digital health standards and governance. Countries that are able to adopt a principled approach to building out national, interoperable digital health solutions, leveraging and reusing global good technologies with multiple systems able to connect together and exchange data, could be those making the largest strides in reaching their country’s health goals.