Resolve to Save Lives (RTSL) trialed our new “HEARTSinaBox” digital toolkit during a hackathon in Indonesia with promising results.
Many countries have an electronic health record (EHR) that collects patient health data, but most aren’t optimized for large scale blood pressure and diabetes management. EHRs that can provide insights to facility and program managers—by zeroing in on key indicators and using dashboards to unpack and act on that data—have contributed to remarkable improvements in program management and patient outcomes globally.
HEARTSinaBox is a digital toolkit that helps programs take an existing EHR to the next level with just two days of programming time. It contains three dashboards—Hypertension program dashboard, Diabetes program dashboard, and an overdue linelist—that allow program managers to easily interpret trends, track outcomes of interventions, and return patients overdue for a health visit to care. Working with RTSL experts, developers can easily integrate the toolkit into their current EHR and provide it with the relevant data quickly.
The two-day hackathon in Indonesia put this concept to the test. Of the twelve participating EHR developers, nine successfully built the toolkit and seven successfully deployed it into their EHR contexts. Winners in three categories won $7,000.
The challenges that the hackathon groups identified informed improvements to the toolkit, including a pathway to push new features to EHRs. RTSL will continue to add tools to HEARTSinaBox and is building a community of contributors for this open-source project.
Heartsin a box is available—free and open source—on GitHub.
Learn more about how a strong digital information system can mean the difference between a health program that fails and one that saves millions of lives.
