The component architecture

The HIE's main function is to enable the point of care systems currently implemented in Rwanda to connect and interoperate more easily. Using the HIE, the MoH plans to promote data re-use between the connected systems and to facilitate information sharing. It also aims to provide patients with a continuity of care record to enable access to a patient's clinical information from different health facilities thus improving the tracking of patients and reducing the number of patients lost-to-follow-up.

The first phase involves deploying a set of foundational infrastructure services that provide services to the point of care applications, initially OpenMRS and RapidSMS. The HIE will allow the systems to share clinical information and ensure that shared information uniquely identifies the patient, provider and facility associated with that clinical information within the information exchange.

The foundational infrastructure services are shown in the diagram below and described thereafter.

Client Registry

This service responds to queries for a patient's demographic and identifying information used to uniquely identify patients.

For more information please see: Client Registry

Professional Registry

This service responds to queries for information about health care professionals who work at participating health care facilities in the information exchange. This is primarily used to uniquely identify health care professionals within the HIE.

For more information please see: Provider Registry

Facilities Registry

This service responds to queries for data on the facilities participating in the information exchange. This is primarily used to maintain current and valid facility codes required in transactions.

For more information please see: Health Facility Registry

Shared Health Record

This service responds to queries for an appropriate subset of the patient’s longitudinal, patient-centric medical record.

For more information please see: Shared Health Record

Terminology Service

This service stores all the clinical code systems (e.g. LOINC, ICD10 and country specific code systems) that will be used within the HIE and facilitates verification and mapping between codes. It exposes endpoints that allow codes to be verified against the stored code systems. 

For more information please see: Terminology Service

Interoperability Layer

The RHEA Health Information Mediator provides an abstraction layer between the application requesting services and the application providing services. It also ensures a single point of contact for all supported services and allows security to be managed at a central point. It provides an abstraction layer for all RHEA transactions so that point of service (PoS) application can easily connect to services and that service providers can be easily swapped out as the architecture grows.

For more information please see: Health Information Mediator - Interoperability Layer