This blog is written by Joe Amlung. Joe is a Technical Advisor for the Regenstrief Institute’s Global Health Informatics team. He has focused on terminology management for several years, particularly by working with the Open Concept Lab (OCL) tools and the OpenMRS and OpenHIE Terminology Services community. He works with community members to help them adopt terminology as part of their work, leading to standardized data for better interoperability.

OCL talks NHDDs at the HELINA Conference

Alongside our Kenyan colleagues Steve Wanyee (Intellisoft) and Francis Njiri (University of Nairobi), OCL’s own Joe Amlung and Jonathan Payne presented at the HELINA Conference in October/November 2023 about the “Journey towards a National Health Data Dictionary (NHDD) in Kenya”. This case study presentation showcased Kenya’s progress toward establishing the tooling, governance, and capacity that will enable sustained success with the Kenya National Health Data Dictionary (Ke-NHDD).

This brief session highlighted the ongoing work between Regenstrief and various Kenyan partners. Supported by CDC’s Technical Assistance Platform (TAP) initiative, the OCL team plays a role in guiding and providing technical assistance for countries like Kenya and Nigeria who are investing into digital health systems and architectures. The OCL toolkit is actually the terminology service of choice to host Kenya’s NHDD! The collaboration around this NHDD continues to be an exemplary success story for terminology implementation among the global community.

The slides from this presentation are available to review here, and we aim to publish the session recording on OCL’s YouTube once it becomes available.