Hello there, my name is Rukshan. I’m a health informatics spcialist, currently
living in Switzerland.
I started as a clinician, and with a background in digital health,
I transitioned to a world of digital health. I love academia and I write papers
on digital health research
Because of my love to computers and programming,
and mostly I spend my time coding on my laptop
making new things.
This is my blog where I write about things that I’m interested about, my ideas,
travels, and occational rants. I hope you would enjoy reading this as much as
I enjoy writing.
I have never been interested in academia and research. I always felt research and academia, or a majority of what people publish is just to fill their profiles with the number of publications. When I think about research, I always think about doing research as something groundbreaking. I remember telling colleagues (and I still do) to read the Page Rank algorithm [link, link 2] publication that formed the backbone of Google search in the beginning. I wanted every research or publication to be something like Page Rank.
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I’ve not been able to write something new lately, in fact, I think this is the first post of the year. So happy new year 2024, insert :tada: emoji. So I’ve been pretty much busy with work, and travelling, networking at conferences, the usual. At the start of 2023, I had never left Sri Lanka in my whole life, but by the end of 2023, I’d visited 5 different countries, including the US.
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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 these standards and do not break away from these standards.
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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 that took some time for me to get used to. There were cultural, administrative, and legal things I had not been used to while in Sri Lanka. I have yet to move to my apartment and live in a studio apartment at the time of writing this. It’s good that I moved to central Europe during the summer and excited to experience my first winter. Now back to what I wanted to tell you about.
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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.
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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 wait for several good minutes to complete the download.
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TLDR The geoJSON specification published in 2016 requires the polygons to follow the right-hand rule. All updated geoJSON files now follow the right-hand rule. However, Superset requires your geoJSON file polygons to follow the opposite direction, breaking the specification. Covert your geoJSON files so polygons are drawn in opposite directions using the script included in Step 5. Include the geoJSON file inside the legacy-plugin-chart-country-map plugin. Import the geoJSON file and rebuild your Superset frontend. 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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