OpenYaLIM E-health Software Development Poject - Mali

OpenYaLIM is software developed by the company IDC (ICT Development Centre) in order to respond to the needs of the IKON teleradiology project, which is funded by IICD in Mali.

OpenYaLIM is an Open Source software build to provide medical diagnosis to remote area in African countries. This software has proven to enable operations of transfer, examination and archiving of responses to expertise requests. This software actually functions in 4 hospitals in Mali.

After two years of application, daily use in hospital structures and an evaluation study of the software revealed a few limitations. In order to make the rest of Mali, Africa and the World benefit from the assets and the experience acquired during the IKON teleradiology project experimentation in Mali, IDC decided to make OpenYALIM (OY) free of use, redistribution and modification by publishing it on the Internet under General Public Licence (GPL). This way all health practitioners in Mali and the World will no longer waste time and money in redeveloping software to support the leveraging process of their E-health activities. Thus, replicating projects such as the IKON teleradiology project will become easier.

However, in order to avoid difficulties met during the utilization of the software in the IKON project, to deal with encountered insufficiencies and to add new functionalities, which will enable the software to support the main E-health activities, it is necessary to re-write the code, make it more readable and to make the software modular. This will facilitate the software evolution and adapt it to all possible cases.

This software will therefore be rewritten and published under General Public Licence in order to correct insufficiencies and respond to the increasing needs for security, ergonomics and performance in E-health. The IDC development team therefore decided to make the software code more effective and safer. This new version will be uploaded and downloadable for free on Sourceforge, the AAUL (Association Africaine des Utilisateurs des Logiciels libres) forge, on the website of FOSSFA (Free and Open Source Software Foundation for Africa) and on a website dedicated to software. This will help the Open source world community to participate in the development of the software by, for instance, sending in their remarks and bug reports on the software. The availability of the software will facilitate the replication of the E-health initiatives developed in Mali and it will encourage the development of new initiatives in the country, the rest of Africa and the World.

IDC SARL is a private company specialised in ICT and E-health. It works with IICD for several years now. IDC is growing but still has limited resources and few software application developers. This led its directors to prioritize the development of applications which could be directly financed. This causes unavoidable delays in the implementation plan of the development of the OpenYaLIM2 software, despite its crucial importance for E-health development in Africa and the rest of the World.

It is also important to have a pool of developers in Mali, which will be in charge of maintenance of the code and future evolution of the OpenYaLIM software as well as other Open Source applications useful for community development and for the achievement of the Millennium Goals. Actually, similar initiatives die because of lack of technical support and a team of skilled developers to support them. Projects such as Akwaba in Ivory Coast, ANM in Madagascar and Kunafonix in Mali (see http://rall.logiciels-libres.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=11), could benefit from such a support. Based on remuneration in order to ensure its sustainability, the pool of competences will also help developing and adapting software applications for community projects or commercial companies.

Read more about IICD's Mali Country Programme.

The project was implemented in April 2007.

Officially, the project has come to completion in June 2008. All objectives were reached - the software is now ready to be field-tested. IDC did not succeed in finding other funders for the last six months of the project and has auto-financed its developers from January 2008 on. One developer left for a better paying job. IDC has submitted an extension proposal to IICD for field testing the software in real life circumstances.

An extension proposal for field testing has been submitted and approved in September 2008.

The objectives for the extension period are:

• put the OY2 version on the server in use by IKON and have the IKON users start to work with the new version
• train the users on OY2
• extend the use of OY2 to two new applications: telepathology and tele-cardiology
• experiment telecytology, in particular in relation with 'gointre', an endemic disease in Mali
• offer OY2 to Health professionals in other developing countries

General Objective:
Support the achievement of the Millennium Goals by facilitating the realisation of E-health systems aiming to improve the quality of healthcare in emerging countries.

Specific objectives:

• Develop a stable, modular and evolutionary version of the OpenYaLIM2 software
• Make the OpenYaLIM2 software available to all under GPL licence
• Support the replication of the IKON teleradiology project in other countries
• Facilitate the work of the IKON project actors by improving OpenYaLIM2
• Facilitate the setup of E-health systems by using OpenYaLIM2
•  Strengthen the capacities of IDC in software development
• Put in place a pool of competences in African software development in Mali

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Read more about IICD's approach towards Health.

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IDC (ICT Development Centre) SARL is a private company that started in 2004 and is specialised in data processing and new technologies such as E-health in the western Africa. IDC works with IICD for several years now. Main ambition of IDC is to adapt new information and communication technologies in Africa in order to use them as sustainable development tools. To achieve this goal, IDC works in different fields: Health, Agriculture, Eduction and Governance.