Communities of practice: The OpenHIE lab information system subcommunity
Laboratories are a key part of a health system, and laboratory information systems (LIS) play an important role in managing data for clinical decision making, disease screening, monitoring, blood safety, and surveillance. As countries try to meet the growing demand for LIS data, ministries have look to open source LIS options like OpenELIS Global, BLIS, and Senaite.
As with many types of health information systems, the community of open source LIS developers and implementers expressed a strong desire to collaborate and share. This collaboration not only helps create stronger software, but also provides a community of lab informatics experts that can support ministries of health and integrate LIS into the broader health information ecosystem.
To address this need, the University of Washington Clinical Informatics Research Group (CIRG) and RTI International began work to build a community of practice for LIS developers and implementers. The OpenHIE Lab Information System Subcommunity was launched at the 2019 OpenHIE annual meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Standards at the center
The LIS Community of Practice was formed under the OpenHIE umbrella. As an international architectural standards organization, OpenHIE encourages knowledge sharing and collaboration centered on the use of standards and standards-based workflows. Using global technology and data sharing standards will allows LIS platforms to fit within the broader structure of health information systems.
Using experience from different LIS platforms, the LIS CoP facilitated conversations about how to prioritize standards and how to incorporate these standards into existing products. In addition, the CoP created a collaborative to achieve a shared specification for a highly prioritized standards-based workflow for LIS-EMR interoperability. This lays the foundation for the community to be able to identify additional workflows that are highly sought for these tools and to collaborate on specifying, publishing, and incorporating these standards in LIS products. This is a small but important step towards a portfolio of open source LIS that provides a better range of choices for ministries of health to select from to meet their specific needs and use cases.
The LIS CoP in action
The LIS CoP has quickly proven its value. An early accomplishment of the LIS CoP was drafting baseline functional requirements for LIS in low-resource contexts. Using community feedback, as assessment protocol was developed and used to run an LIS Assessment Survey for both software innovators and implementers. A more comprehensive assessment was conducted across four countries in 2020 – the results of which will be shared with the LIS COP this year.
The LIS CoP also addressed the need to create stronger connections between LIS and electronic medical records (EMR). Through facilitated discussions, a LIS-EMR workflow specification was developed over the course of 2020 that used FHIR as its base. This workflow was published as part of the OpenHIE 3.0 architecture in September of 2020.
One of the strengths of the LIS CoP is the diversity of community members. Participants in CoP discussions drew on expertise from software development, health informatics, laboratory systems, and many other technical areas. This was important to inform laboratory workflows as well as going deeper into the technical details of standards and interoperability. As the LIS CoP continues to grow, this diverse community will ensure laboratory information systems meet the needs of countries around the world.
The Building a Laboratory Information Systems Community of Practice (LIS CoP) project was conducted from January 2019 to December 2020 by the University of Washington Clinical Informatics Research Group (CIRG) and RTI International.