From late 2025 into early 2026, the DHIS2 Extensibility team teamed up with the DHIS2 health domain experts to take a closer look at how EMRs are being used together with DHIS2 today. We ran two surveys to understand what implementers are actually building, and where the recurring pain points sit. This post walks through the headline findings. If you want to dig into the details, you can find the full report here.
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.
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).