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· 34 min read

We are excited about the recent release of Progressive Web App (PWA) features in our App Platform, which you can read about in this blog post introducing them, and we think we have some interesting stories to share about their development. We faced interesting design challenges as we sought to make these features easily generalizable to any app, and the ways we used available technologies to solve those challenges are quite unique. The purpose of this post is to share our novel approach to managing service worker lifecycles and other PWA functionality in a generic way.

· 9 min read

COVID-19 has highlighted the importance of having public laboratories efficiently integrated with the rest of the healthcare architecture. It’s been shown through numerous case studies that connecting labs with the country’s health information exchanges (HIEs) significantly facilitates critical activities such as disease surveillance, notification of test results, reporting to stakeholders, and inventory control. It follows that DHIS2 can play a pivotal role in these use cases. Imagine the national Health Management Information System (HMIS) displaying the daily tally of new positive tuberculosis cases on its dashboard as soon as the test results are available at the lab, or a surveillance system notifying patients of their results. Another innovative use case gaining traction is for DHIS2 to collect the state of lab diagnostics (i.e., error rates, usage frequency, online status, etc…) in order to simplify their management.

· 5 min read

As we’ve recently had the DHIS2 Annual Conference, we’ve also completed the 2023 App Competition tied to the conference. On Thursday, the finalists were able, in 7 minutes, to present their Android or Web application, and once all were done, the audience decided which app they thought was the best.

· 8 min read

At HISP Centre, we've been engineering numerous run-of-the-mill integration projects where data is exchanged back and forth with DHIS2 through its Web API. Typically, this data is filtered, mapped, transformed, enriched, and routed to or from an application which could be the same DHIS2 instance, a different instance, or even a distinct application altogether.

· 10 min read

The general availability of DHIS-to-RapidPro was announced in the DHIS 2.39 release. Funded by UNICEF, DHIS-to-RapidPro provides connectivity between DHIS2 and an open-source workflow engine geared towards mobile-based services called RapidPro.

DHIS-to-RapidPro is a reliable, extensible, operations-friendly Java solution, powered by Apache Camel, that offers:

  • Routine synchronisation of RapidPro contacts with DHIS2 users.
  • Aggregate report transfer from RapidPro to DHIS2 via polling or webhook messaging.
  • Automated reminders to RapidPro contacts when their aggregate reports are overdue.

· 6 min read

Tracker-to-Aggregate, or T2A for short, is a pattern that has been used with great success when improving the performance of program indicators in DHIS2. Program indicators are expressions based on data elements and attributes of tracked entities which can be used to calculate values based on a formula. T2A can solve the problem where it’s computationally expensive to calculate program indicators in real-time. A common symptom to this recurring problem is an endless spinning circle when opening a dashboard that computes a program indicator over millions of tracked entity instances:

· 9 min read

DHIS2 is a platform that can receive and host data from different sources, while it can also share data with other systems and reporting mechanisms. Integrating with DHIS2, or building any integration for that matter, requires manual or automated testing of the integration itself. The growth of container technology, and in particular Docker, has reduced the pain of automating the testing of integrations. By automating, I mean self-contained integration test suites that run out-of-the-box and require no manual setup of their external runtime dependencies (Docker Engine is assumed to be installed on the machine running the tests).

· 11 min read

The DHIS2 App Platform now supports PWA capabilities in apps made with the platform! The Dashboard App will be the first core app to take advantage of these features to enable offline capability, and it will be used as an example in this article to describe the details of these features.

This article will give a brief overview of the new features available and some examples that illustrate how they can be used. A future article will go into detail about the technical decisions behind these features and their designs.