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.

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