OpenHIE Health Worker Registry

The iHRIS community and CapacityPlus have been working within the architectural framework of the Open Health Information Exchange (OpenHIE) to promote adoption of standards for exchange of health workforce information. Standards allow health worker information to be shared between iHRIS and other health worker information systems, as well as with the larger health information system.

The OpenHIE Health Worker Registry (HWR) is the central authority for maintaining the unique identities of health workers within a country based on agreed-upon standards. The freely available, open source database contains a minimum set of details for all health workers working in both public and private sectors and acts as the parent data source for all HRIS. The HWR pulls data from regional health worker management systems (such as iHRIS Manage, faith-based organizations, and private-sector systems) and regulatory bodies like nursing councils into a centralized database. The HWR contains a minimum dataset on all providers of healthcare services that can be shared to all systems that need them.

The OpenHIE community and CapacityPlus collaborated with an open access international development standards organization, Integrating the Health Enterprise (IHE), to create international standards for provider registries called Care Services Discovery (CSD). Because it is based on this international standard profile, the OpenHIE HWR acts as the canonical authority on health workers for all systems to update and validate their own records.

iHRIS is compliant with the CSD standard, and developers will find the code base very similar to iHRIS. With adequate Internet connectivity, multiple iHRIS installations or other systems that are CSD-compliant can use the  HWR to share data. The HWR user interface leverages core iHRIS technologies to manage health worker information. This enables the iHRIS Global Support Community to easily support future HWR deployments.