Towards the Development of an Interlink Protocol for Disease Surveillance Data Aggregation: A Namibian Context

Wikipedia’s definition of semantic interoperability is about two or more computer systems having the ability to be able to communicate and exchange data in a meaningful way, which means data exchanged from different source can be understood by the other computer systems. Protocols specify interactions between the communicating entities. In this research, a protocol is developed as an interpreter of disease surveillance data from heterogeneous health information systems (HIS) in Namibian public health institutions for data semantic interoperability. This enables the District Health Information System (DHIS-2) and other health information silo systems to exchange health data and information, and specifically disease surveillance data. The study has produced a new interlink protocol which acts as a converter of data coming from multiple silo systems. Therefore, the interlink protocol has the capability to aggregate disease surveillance data from different data sources. This interlink protocol is based on JSON format.