The Health Enterprise Architecture Laboratory (HEAL) is funded by grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC).  It seeks to apply the principles of architectural design to the development of better health information systems especially within low resource settings. A key focus of HEAL is to provide the academic infrastructure that will enable it to partner with organizations able to provide co-funding and innovative projects for students.  To this end, HEAL works with public and private, local and international organizations to provide support for practical research projects to develop architectural artifacts and software building blocks at various levels in the healthcare system. Through its existing partners, HEAL has access to field sites and associated projects and partners in several low an middle income countries, including South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Rwanda and Cambodia.

HEAL aims to:

• conduct world class research into appropriate health informatics enterprise class architectures and their applications in low-resource settings, and to develop, implement and evaluate prototypes of these systems.
• perform research into the application of enterprise architecture, interoperability of the components of a health information system and health informatics in low resource settings
• identify technology gaps in health information systems and develop new and relevant technologies and architectures for application in field sites through “living labs”
• reflect on how applied research on interoperable HIS can impact the governance of the health system and promote health system strengthening

1. Next generation architectures

Investigate and evaluate next generation architectures in national health information systems. Architectural paradigms include:

● Service Oriented Architectures

● Agent based architectures

Systems should be evaluated on one or more of the following aspects using the NHIS requirements of at least one African country:

● Semantic interoperability

● Orchestration

● Distributed information processing

● Clinical decision support

● Software adaptability

● Software reusability

2. Knowledge Representation and reasoning

There are two research thrusts:

2.1. An ontology approach for health software engineering for developing countries

This involves the development of ontological models to represent and reason about architectural artifacts for a national health information system for developing African countries

Examples of artifacts are: software tools and platforms; architectural designs and patterns; standards and requirements. The models may be used for example within repositories of tools such as the Health Enterprise Architecture Repository of Tools (HEART). This will enable developers to discover, share, evaluate, and reuse artifacts.

2.2. Clinical decision support in open health architectures for developing countries

Representation of:

· The various socio-economic factors affecting public health decision-making in low resource settings

· Clinical algorithms used in low resources settings, e.g. for HIV or TB treatment

· Data mining and query languages for analysis of clinical data

3. Remote and mobile device integration in national health information systems

The design and development of open frameworks to enable heterogeneous remote and mobile diagnostic device integration into Open Health Architectures. The components of the framework would include data modeling and communication protocol standards. Current case studies include remote lung function devices and in-situ ICU devices.