TOWARDS AN AFRICA HEALTH DATA SPACE: VODAN PHASE III
It is a great pleasure to deliver the 2023 Annual Report of VODAN-Africa, which presents the outcomes of the deployment of VODAN-Africa V2.
VODAN-Africa has enjoyed the support of Philips and the Philips Foundation since 2020 when we began the first deployment to create digital patient data within a FAIR-based architecture for pandemic surveillance and knowledge integration.
The deployment of VODAN-A V01 was completed with a Proof of Concept in 2020. This showed the potential of a federated architecture in which data could be visited across countries and continents and inclusive of low-resource areas, often under-represented in the data.
The Requirements and Specifications of VODAN-A V02 stipulated that a dynamic architecture should be set up, adapted to the different contextual situations in Africa, and relevant to the specific needs of each health facility. At the end of 2022, VODAN-Africa has been deployed in 90 health facilities across eight countries. VODAN strived to ensure the curation of data.
This report sets out the next phase following the deployment which was realised in 2022. VODAN-Africa is proud to present this report as we embark on the review of Requirements and Specifications for VODAN-Africa V03, which will start in 2024.
We are grateful to everyone who has enabled the progress we present in this report. VODAN-A has grown into a lively, solid network, that delivers granular quality data for the generation of knowledge for better care, for support of decisions by AI-generated models for the surveillance of patients, the integration of data with different provenance and the re-use of data for further health research in theAfrica Health Data Space.
Mirjam van Reisen,
PI VODAN-Africa,
Chair FAIR Data Science, LUMC
