Google Summer of Code 2013 Organization Health Information Systems Programme

Health Information Systems Programme

Web Page: http://dhis2.org/gsoc2013

Mailing List: https://lists.launchpad.net/dhis2-devs/

HISP (Health Information Systems Programme) is a global south-south-north collaborative network aiming to improve health care in developing countries through research on and implementation of Health Information Systems. Coordinated by the Global Infrastructures Research Group at Department of Informatics of the University of Oslo, the network has since 1994 been involved in many countries in the "Global South". At the core of the programme is the development of the open source DHIS software and the use of this application to strengthen country health information systems. The DHIS 2 software is used in more than 30 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the South Pacific, and countries that have adopted DHIS 2 as their nation-wide HIS software include Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Ghana, Liberia, and Bangladesh. A rapidly increasing number of countries and organizations are starting up new deployments. We are involved in multi-disciplinary research with a focus on action-research with 6 professors, about 40 active PhD students, many masters students and many software developers from different implementing organizations worldwide. The focus for the Summer of Code is the development of DHIS2.

We work so that low-resources in poor & middle-income countries are available at the right places, at the right time and information from different programs, information systems can be brought together for better management

Projects

Android application for DHIS 2 Every day quantity of Android smartphones increases with unreal speed, and low price of devices makes them available to people with low income. As the result they are widely used in developing countries, where dhis2 is used as well. So I think dhis2 Android client should be implemented in the first order. First of all, Android application of dhis2 should support variety of OS versions (beginning from 2.2 – Gingerbread ending with 4.X - Jellybean) because a lot of devices still didn’t get update to new Android 4.X (maybe will not at all). This app should be simple and straightforward, so I want it to be in HOLO style. And of course it should be multi-lingual. I’m planning to implement core of application before first deadline (POSTing and GETting data from server, reporting ability, offline mode). After mid-term I want to add Geolocation support , implement Tablet interface and make application multilingual.
Create Metadata sharing tools to Export & Import subsets of DHIS2 Metadata Brief explanation: DHIS2 defines metadata such as data elements, datasets, indicators, forms, sections etc. New implementations start with a blank database at the moment. The goal of this project is to be able to share parts of metadata from another DHIS2 instance and import into a new DHIS2. The project is to create a metadata sharing tool that will expose a subset of DHIS2 metadata and expose it as DXF2.0 format.
Dialplan (PBX) generation for patient communication I propose to implement the Dialplan (PBX) generation for patient communication, as stated on the ideas page. The goal of my implementation is to make it as simple and easy as possible for the users to create the reminders, record messages and have calls deployed/dispatched automatically. In order to reach this goal, the additional feature of automatically dispatched calls should be inserted into the normal workflow of the user, seamlessly integrating into the existing system of program stages and the tracker API.
Mobile visualizer Now DHIS2 server has visualizer module. It currently uses ExtJS as the framework and this module is a widely across the globe for data analysis in DHIS2. The project that I'd be working on this summer is to port the same functionality to work on smartphone devices. I will to use Sencha Touch2 and Sencha Charts to provide the same features. This will allow me to re-use a lot of ExtJS code from that module. It will also give one bonus. Using Sencha Touch Charts, I can create HTML5 mobile applications by packaging them through PhoneGap or something else in future. So in future I will try convert my html5 app to smartphone application.