Developing ehealth Solutions
just became easier
Aether - A free, open source development platform for data curation, exchange, and publication.
Created by eHealth Africa to scale and secure the development of ehealth solutions.
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Save lives one datapoint at a time
eHealth Africa’s years of experience in developing data-driven solutions for health systems has shown that we faced recurring challenges when building tailored solutions.
We saw a clear opportunity to solve these challenges with a unique application that enables us to speed up the way effective health intervention and emergency services decisions are made.
Aether is a reliable and secure development platform created by eHealth Africa to enable organizations to build solutions that curate and exchange live information. It utilizes “data contracts” between systems, simplifies the movement of data between applications, and helps developers adhere to best practices for ehealth system design.
Aether is an open source project that is freely available to everyone.
We believe that eHealth Africa’s solutions save lives when they are completed quickly, adopted fully, maintained easily, and interoperate with other solutions
Challenges in developing resilient ehealth solutions
Interoperability
Effective health interventions require medical data to be fast and easily shared between health organizations and their partners. However, their Information Management Systems (IMS) usually do not speak the same language, making the data exchange process slower and expensive.
Security and Privacy
Data Privacy and Security are particularly important when handling personally identifiable health records. Despite the established right to health data protection, it sometimes falls second to other programmatic or analytical goals in order to accelerate the access to data.
Lack of Data Workflow Processes
A lack of effective processes for creating, modifying, and releasing health data is delaying the availability of accurate, up-to-date information. This hinders the decision-making process and impacts public health services delivery.
Features
Interoperate different source data
Collect structured data from different sources.
Map the different data to common “schemas” using entity mapping and extraction features.
Connect Aether with different external applications in real time
Store data as messages which can be read by or publish to external applications.
Develop connectors for unsupported or custom applications using an Aether Software Developer Kit.
Deploy protected and secure data
Mask sensitive data before publication.
Publish data using either highly secured cloud environments or in on-premises deployments.
Benefits
Data interoperability
Real time data exchange
Easy data integration with external applications
Increased data privacy
Enhanced data security
Open and freely available to use
Gather - A data collection solution built on Aether
Gather - a versatile data collection and curation tool built on top of Aether. Gather enables people to securely collect data in the field and quickly share it anywhere where it is needed.
The Challenge
Oftentimes different data collected in the field need to be aggregated and transformed through workflow processes before being published. Most of the existing data collection tools, however, do not support the data interoperability and curation needed to perform these tasks and have to go through the expensive process of exporting and restructuring data before publishing them.
The Solution
Being built on Aether, Gather can interoperate differently structured data collected in the field, integrate them with other systems and workflows for data management, transformation and analysis, and securely deploy them using cloud environments or on-premises deployments.
The Impact
Developed in 2015 for a nutrition project in Somalia, Gather is currently in use on a number of different projects in several countries, and has already collected data from hundreds of thousands of submissions. Here are a few projects for which Gather2 was used:
CHAMPS
(Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance) where Gather collects and shares child mortality data from Sierra Leone with a global network of organizations aiming to identify and prevent child death.
An average of 11 calls per week to report child deaths in 2018
GRID - Nigeria
where Gather was used to collect and interoperate different spatial reference data to create a geodatabase for data-driven decision making by government.
460,014 points of interest collected since Nov 2017
Microcensus - DRC
where Gather was used as a data collection tool with enhanced UI to predict how many people live in each settlement and estimate the total population for DRC.
Over34,000households and171,000individuals were surveyed