Introducing mobile mapping on OpenSRP FHIR to support precision healthcare

We’re delighted to add Kujaku, an Android GeoJSON mapping library, to the OpenSRP FHIR Core community health management app. Check out the demo walkthrough above, which shows a map of households color coded by urgency of health visit, then continue reading to learn how we envision this technology to be used for precision healthcare.

Precision healthcare takes into account individual variability in environment and lifestyle to allow doctors, researchers, and digital health implementers to better prevent negative outcomes and more accurately prescribe treatments for particular conditions and groups of people. Precision health occurring outside a heath facility is often carried out by community health workers, with responsibilities such as controlling disease spread, managing routine care, and conducting medical interventions. Community health workers accomplish these tasks by routinely visiting households to do hygiene checks or uncovering danger signs for antenatal, reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health. 

Mapping in OpenSRP will be transformative to providing health services in the frontlines. Combining geospatial mapping with the ability to prioritize who needs health services most gives health workers a new tool to better understand which of their activities will provide the most impact. We see the mapping feature to be key for improving intervention planning, outbreak monitoring, vulnerable population identification, and health data communication. 

On the technical side, captured location information is stored as GeoJSON in FHIR resources. This would typically be the FHIR Location resource, but OpenSRP FHIR Core’s configurability lets users customize what FHIR resource to store data in.

Get in touch to learn more about how to apply geospatial mapping on Android to your healthcare projects fhir@ona.io, on Twitter @onadata and LinkedIn.