Current Status of e-Health in Burkina Faso.

The term e-health refers to all areas where information and communication technologies (ICT) are used for health. E-health appears more and more as a relevant solution to meet the challenges health systems are facing. However, despite its interest, e-health has long remained underexploited in Burkina Faso even if many softwares have been the subject of investments in hospitals as part of a modernization of administrative operations, which does not directly contribute to the quality of care. Hospital information systems (HIS) are the foundation on which e-health is based. They organize, at the IT level, the exchange of information between departments within the same hospital. It is on those systems that the shared medical record (SMR) is based. In this paper, we present an inventory of the implementation of e-health in Burkina Faso. We collected data on hospital information systems deployed in major hospitals in Burkina Faso. Then we analyzed the level of interoperability of those hospital information systems and we finally proposed an interoperability approach adapted to Burkina Faso.

Towards an Architecture for the Interoperability of Hospital Information Systems in Burkina Faso.

The successful introduction of ICTs into medical practice is a key factor in improving the performance of any health system for both patients and healthcare professionals. In Burkina Faso, many hospital information systems (HIS) have been developed and are already widely used in large health centers with proven efficiency. To improve the quality of patient care, these hospital information systems should exchange information. Interoperability is one of the privileged ways to improve the integration of different systems because nowadays a HIS is no longer just a single monolithic software system, which is run on a single machine. This paper presents a semantic interoperability architecture, which is based on a mediation approach. The mediator implements local domain ontologies for each HIS, a knowledge base, and a referential ontology which is used as a semantic repository and web services.

IDOMEN: An Extension of Infectious Disease Ontology for MENingitis.

In sub-Saharan African countries the prevention and control of epidemic diseases requires the improvement of the surveillance system for these diseases. Biomedical ontologies are a growing field that can improve health information systems. Indeed biomedical ontologies allow semantic support, data integration, automated reasoning. We are building a meningitis ontology to assist filtering messages relevant to meningitis domain on social media in order to predict a possible epidemic. Indeed, the messages filtered are used for data and event extraction that serve as input for a meningitis surveillance system. In this paper we focused on the modeling and formalization of different perspectives of the meningitis disease such as biological perspective, clinical perspective, epidemiological and public health perspective. This paper presents the three modules in the global Infection Disease Ontology for Meningitis (IDOMEN) and at the end, we illustrate a case of reasoning with our ontology.

Cause-of-death certification in Africa: analysis of a model implemented at the teaching hospital of Souro Sanou of Bobo-Dioulasso (Burkina Faso).

INTRODUCTION: In Africa, mortality statistics are not reliable due to the low performance of the death registering systems. Our aim is to implement an efficient system. In this article we make a comparison between the existing system model and the new system that will be set up. METHOD: UML has been used as the modeling language based on the 2TUP analysis methods. RESULTS: the new system for registering deaths and their causes was conceived and represented through activities, utilization cases and data model diagrams. DISCUSSION: We have developed a tool for death registration taking into account African hospitals characteristics. The progressive deployment of this system at the CHUSS of Bobo-Dioulasso enables users and actors to appropriate it.