What does Connected Health Framework mean for the Middle East and Africa region?

This is one of the questions that often came up during my conversations with health IT professionals and I would like to share my perspectives on this topic.

Let's start with a brief description of CHF:

Connected Health Framework is a set of vendor-agnostic best practices and guidelines for building electronic health (or e-Health) solutions based on a service oriented architecture (SOA) and industry standards. The Architecture and Design Blueprint provides healthcare organizations with an approach to developing information networks with common business and technical design definitions. The Architecture and Design Blueprint will continue to evolve to help move healthcare toward a broad system of interconnected, reliable, efficient, and security-enhanced services.

Trends in the Middle East and Africa:

 In the Middle East and Africa region, improving accessibility to the healthcare systems and sustainability for the future is gaining importance every day in many countries. Governments have been building or refreshing their national health strategies to address the changes in the population and changes in the socio-economic factors. Addressing  the needs around security, interoperability, privacy, and access to legacy systems is becoming a common discussion topic in different platforms including governments, health providers, standard bodies and citizens.

In the Gulf region, we see governments building new hospitals, initiating medical tourism with a focus on increasing quality of the services, patient safety, and clinical effectiveness. There is a focus on regulation and policies.  Since UAE, Saudi have the highest diabetes rates in the world, preventive medicine is considered as a key area that will help to reduce overall healthcare costs.

In some countries in Africa, focus on health services is more towards to include immunization, communicable and endemic disease prevention, maternity care, screening of children, Integrated Management of Childhood Illnesses (IMCI) and child healthcare, and family planning. There is a need for telemedicine solutions due to distributed population and limited number of health professionals.

We also see Telemedicine need in some other countries to provide access to urban population and also rural population due to limited specialized health professionals.

Going forward, it is becoming more important everyday to enable medical professionals and make the data available to them and provide them with platforms so that they can collaborate among their colleagues and support them with decision support systems and telemedicine applications. We see that collection of data, storage, analysis, easy access and planning, as well specifying the strategy helps MOHs to plan and build a strategy that meets the needs of nations not only today but also in the future.

Training and education of those working in the health sector have been costly and this is an important factor to ensure quality. There are also needs to have medical training environments that professionals get access from anywhere, any time. 

Additionally, World Health Organization is working with all countries towards regional and global health security. Disease surveillance is becoming more important. The main role of disease surveillance is to predict, observe, and minimize the harm caused by outbreak, epidemic, and pandemic situations, as well as increase our knowledge as to what factors might contribute to such circumstances. A key part of modern disease surveillance is the practice of disease case reporting that will enable rapid detection and response to emerging diseases and other health emergencies of national and international concern.

These aspects increase the need to exchange and share of electronic medical information. With the hospital information systems and through their integration, we see that there is a need for the applications built with interoperability and integration in mind. The usage of the national and international health informatics standards are gaining more importance and we see there are standard bodies have been built to initiate these efforts. By enabling interoperability between virtually any combination of systems, devices, and data, making it easier for people who work in the health ecosystem and their patients and consumers to find the information and resources they need.

What makes Connected Health Framework important in the region?

The Connected Health Framework Architecture and Design Blueprint provides generic and scenario specific recommendations illustrating how to design, develop, deploy, and operate an architecturally sound application portfolio and interoperability infrastructure in a healthcare environment. A system implemented according to Microsoft's guidelines would employ a common architecture – based on industry best practices and modern design techniques – to link patients, healthcare professionals, application developers, independent software vendors (ISVs), and government agencies.

The recommendations in CHF  are based on a thorough analysis of what's required for e-Health transformation and on the technology designs that will meet those requirements in the most practical and effective manner.

Taking the trends in the region into consideration,  CHF allows you to build systems to respond to the key challenges involving security, interoperability, privacy, and access to legacy systems. It also would engender trust among users, which is an intangible qualification required to draw a critical mass of information into a broad e-Health system.

Overall, either it is implementing a national health information network, developing EMR , Telemedicine  solution, knowledge management solutions; technology becomes a key player in addressing some of these challenges and more importantly, it is critical to adopt an infrastructure for e-health that will enable health systems to meet today’s, future’s needs. Thus, improve health  in the MEA region.

Kind regards,

Cigdem Aygun