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 these standards and do not break away from these standards. ...

October 31, 2023 · Rukshan

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 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. ...

September 26, 2023 · Rukshan

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. ...

June 25, 2023 · Rukshan

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 wait for several good minutes to complete the download. ...

March 30, 2023 · Rukshan

How to Correctly Load Your Country in to Apache Superset

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. ...

March 11, 2023 · Rukshan

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. ...

February 10, 2023 · Rukshan

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. ...

December 26, 2022 · Rukshan

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. ...

December 16, 2022 · Rukshan

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. ...

October 17, 2022 · Rukshan

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. ...

September 26, 2022 · Rukshan