Hi there!
My name is Rukshan, a wonderer, blogger, occasional coder and a health informatics guy.
I’m Rukshan Ranatunge, currently following my Master’s of Science degree in the field of Biomedical Informatics. I’m interested in digital health systems and achieving interoperability between digital health systems.
This is the place where I write about my musings in my everyday life, tutorials, adventures and misadventures, hot takes and everything in between. If you find my writing helpful, please leave a comment.
Latest musings
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XForm and XLSFrom Standards are Preventing The Progress of Digital Health
Recently, apart from my work on FHIR and interoperability, I got a chance to work on clinical decision support, healthcare surveys and verbal autopsy. All these clinical decision support, healthcare surveys and verbal autopsies have one thing in common. All three struggle because of a long-forgotten web standard, a pseudo standard and applications that use…
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I was happy, sad, lost and lonely without a smartphone at the same time
I haven’t posted on my blog for a long time, partly because I have been super busy with my personal and work life. I moved to Switzerland to work as a health informatics specialist for the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, and moving to Switzerland in a very short period has been a change…
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Why We Need Interoperability and HL7 FHIR
I was lucky enough to attend the DHIS2 annual conference at the University of Oslo last week, where I was able to meet experts from all around the world in digital health to discuss not just DHIS2 but also FHIR and interoperability in general. When I describe my part in developing the national FHIR profiles…
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Is It Time to Open Source SublimeText?
Recently I had to do some text editing and was in need of a text editor that was better than Notepad, and with muscle memory, I went on and tried to download VSCodium. However, the download was like 100+ megabytes in size and since I was using a public internet connection that would make me…
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How to Correctly Load Your Country in to Apache Superset
TLDR Apache Superset is a free and open-core data analysis tool that offers a wide range of really neat features for a business. It’s a good piece of software where you don’t have the budget to spend on an expensive business intelligence tool. Sadly their documentation is not up to date, the questions and solutions…
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Installing DHIS2 on a Windows Server
Recently a college contacted me asking how they can install DHIS2 on a Windows server which they have just received on their premises. Since most tutorials available on the internet discuss installing DHIS2 on a server running a Linux distribution, he was finding it difficult to follow the steps outlined in those tutorials. I decided…
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Running a Local HAPI FHIR Server For Testing HL7 FHIR Requests
When implementing FHIR, a FHIR server is essential for validating and process incoming FHIR requests from clients. Also, it will be the place where you store your customized profiles, valuesets, and codesystems that is necessary for managing terminology. HAPI FHIR is the most popular FHIR server available at the moment and has been available for…
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Installing Apache Superset Version 2 on Ubuntu Without Errors
Apache Superset is a great free and open-source software released by the Apache foundation for advanced data visualization and exploration. Unlike proprietary tools for data visualization, Apache Superset adds value for an organization as free and open-source software. Once installed, you can create multiple dashboards with multiple varieties of charts, maps, etc, and connect multiple…
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Codeberg a GitHub Alternative From Europe
Recently I started migrating my note-taking from Notion to Obsidian. Obsidian does not offer free syncing between devices and you will have to manually set up a method to sync your notes, either by using something like Dropbox, Google Drive, or Git. So I thought it would be easier for me to set up a…
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The rings of share – the unsolved problem of sharing
Recently (last Saturday), I went to the Colombo Street Food Festival. It was a bit crowded for my liking but had awesome music and good beer. I snapped some photos of the event, recorded some clips of the music, and snapped some more photos with the others who I went to the festival with. I…
My Story
Read more about the guy behind this blog and what I’m up to.
Reach Out
I’m open to work on challenging projects in digital health.
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My Work
National Covid Health Information System
I helped in development and implementation of the National Covid Health Information System
FHIR Implementation
I’m currently engaged in implementing FHIR standards for the Ministry of Health Sri Lanka and achieve interoperability in healthcare.
Sri Lankan Open Data Portal for Health
I’m currently designing and developing the Open Data Portal for Health In Sri Lanka as part of my Master’s thesis.