GHCon2023

GHCon is an annual conference that brings together enthusiasts and developers of the Free/Libre Health & Hospital Information System. During the 2-day conference, you’ll have the opportunity to attend the different thematic sessions and free workshops and share experiences and implementation cases and, of course, network with GNU Health community members from around the world!

Day 1 is registration day and IWEEE, the International Workshop on eHealth in Emerging economies. IWEEE is about Social Medicine, a space to give voice to the voiceless, share the experiences from different organizations around the World, and try to find ways to improve the lives of the underprivileged.

Day 2 is dedicated exclusively to GNU Health. In the thematic talks, we will discuss topics such as the upcoming features, standards, security, mobile applications, and implementation cases. At GNU Solidario, we will be honored to have you among us. We are counting on your active participation to get the most out of the conference. Most importantly, we want you to have fun, feel at home, and enjoy being part of the GNU Health community!

About GNU Health

GNU Health is, first and foremost, a social project to bring freedom and equity in health care around the World. GNU Health involves much more than just technology. It’s about Social Medicine and providing the means to improve the Public Health System with Free Software. GNU Health counts with a growing, committed and friendly international community, that brings the best from the social, biological, medical and computer science fields. No matterwhere in the world you live, we are passionate to keep health - and health informatics - a non - negotiable human right. GNU Health is a Free/Libre project for health practitioners, health institutions and governments. It provides the functionality of Electronic Medical record, Hospital Management, and Health Information System. Its modular design allows to be deployed in different scenarios: from small private offices, to large distributed networks or even at national public health systems. GNU HEALTH has won among others, the Free Software Foundation award for Project of Social Benefit award or the OSBAR Business Award. It has been declared an official GNU package and has been adopted by the United Nations University.

About the International Workshop on e-Health in Emerging Economies (IWEEE)

The International Workshop on e-Health in Emerging Economies (IWEEE) is an annual conference for Free / Libre Software in Healthcare and Social Medicine advocates. The workshop promotes Free Software as an effective and ethical solution to provide universality and equity in health care. IWEEE will take place on the first day of the GNUHealthCon conference. IWEEE brings together a multi-disciplinary team from NGOs, Academia, Government and companies to try to find ways to improve the lives of millions of human beings around the world. IWEEE focuses on the human factor, and how technology can make a difference in the socio-economic determinants of health. Throughout these years, IWEEE has become a place to share experiences, ideas and debate on technology and politics. It has been the incubator of many projects that are a reality today around the World.

Speakers

• Alain Mazy & Benoit Crickboom, Orthanc Team, Deploy Orthanc as a secured cloud PACS: From A to Z
• Alvaro Cerezuela, ITARA, GNU Health in Surgical Non-governmental Organizations
• Armand Mpassy-Nzoumba, GNU Solidario & Blue Rose Project, GNU Health Implementation in Africa - Reviving the Dream
• Axel Braun, Axxite, Breast Cancer Screening - How AI, GNU Health and Orthanc help
• Fernando Sassetti, UNER - Universidad Nacional de Entre Rios, GNU Health in cancer control
• Gerald Wiese, Leibniz University Hannover & GNU Solidario, Automating the installation & administration of GNU Health using Ansible
• Guido Arnold, Duisburg Institute for Linguistics and Social Research (DISS), Technology-critical perspectives on AI
• Julian Sassenscheidt, Sea Eye, Search and rescue on the central Mediterranean migratory route
• Luis Falcón, GNU Solidario, The Global Exposome Project
• Marie Berthe Deudjeu, Transforming Maternal and Newborn Healthcare Management with GNU Health: A Case Study at the Nkometou Medical-Surgical Center in Cameroon
• Paula Moreno Fajardo, Instituto Tecnológico de Canarias (ITC), Opendx28: Open-Source Health App Ecosystem - Modular SaaS for Epidemic Alerts & Tech Education
• Sébastien Jodogne, UCLouvain On the Use of DICOM as a Storage Layer for STL and IIIF

Presentations

Technology-critical perspectives on AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is currently experiencing its iPhone moment. ChatGPT has triggered an unprecedented hype around AI. But how viable is the imitation of 'comprehension' or 'knowledge' when machine learning merely replicates and amplifies stochastic correlations - devoid of meaning? Is there a usage of AI for the common good or are we more likely to face a disempowering social decay as AI assistance increases?

• Guido Arnold / Duisburg Institute for Linguistics and Social Research (DISS)

Search and rescue on the central Mediterranean migratory route

Migration across the Mediterranean is considered the world's most dangerous migratory route, with thousands of drowned and missing migrants every year. Since 2015, the NGO Sea Eye has been operating ships that conduct search and rescue (SAR) operations on the central Mediterranean route. Since then, more than 17,000 refugees have been rescued from distress at sea. From the beginning, the missions have been accompanied by medical teams that provide care in the onboard hospital. To improve the documentation of medical cases, GNU Health was installed on the ship's server in 2023. Further applications like stock management and information management of all guests on board are conceivable. This presentation describes the SAR actions of the NGOs working on the Mediterranean, the medical work on board and the first steps of the implementation of GNU Health.

• Julian Sassenscheidt / Sea Eye

Automating the installation & administration of GNU Health using Ansible

This project aims to automate and improve the installation strategy of GNU Health. Different features were added in order to enhance security and performance. Nevertheless Ansible allows to keep the installation easy, overseeable and reproducible. By using our PyPI packages for installing GNU Health itself we are becoming independent from operating systems package maintainers. During the last year the main advances are in areas of modularity, testing, polishing and adding more standard system administration procedures. GNU Health is already hosting a repository of this in parallel with the traditional installation method but might move the default installation strategy to Ansible.

• Gerald Wiese / Leibniz University Hannover & GNU Solidario

Deploy Orthanc as a secured cloud PACS: From A to Z

While the local installation of Orthanc is quite straight forward, it could become a little bit tricky when Orthanc has to be deployed into the cloud. We will walk through the whole process, step by step, until a fully secured and world wide reachable PACS. We will describe the prerequisites and show how to fully configure the server. Then, we will review the Compose file and deploy Orthanc thanks to Docker. We will highlight the ensitive information to manage and show how the user management system works.

• Alain Mazy & Benoit Crickboom / Orthanc Team

On the Use of DICOM as a Storage Layer for STL and IIIF

A common misconception about DICOM is that this interoperability standard is entirely focused on medical images that are made of pixels/voxels. In this talk, we will demonstrate how DICOM can be used to store, archive, and share, on one hand, 3D models of anatomical structures encoded as STL files and, on the other hand, high-resolutions images that are not related to the medical field. Firstly, this talk will introduce a free and open-source software pipeline to generate models either from binary bitmap volumes that were produced by artificial intelligence algorithms, or from contours that were manually delineated by physicians, then to encapsulate the generated models as DICOM instances. Our pipeline also features a lightweight Web viewer that is suitable for rendering DICOM STL instances by any Web browser. Secondly, this talk will explore how the DICOM standard has the potential to contribute to the long-term preservation of humanities research data, besides standard medical images. More precisely, an Orthanc plugin that publishes DICOM images according to the IIIF standard will be introduced, which represents a fully working solution to archive and exchange cultural assets, with application to international cooperation in education and culture preservation.

• Sébastien Jodogne / UCLouvain

The Global Exposome Project

The Global Exposome is a GNU Solidario project that takes a holistic approach to the effect the environment has on living organisms as a whole. The current economic model is both unethical and unsustainable. Climate emergency; water, air and land pollution; deforestation and war are putting humanity and the planet at the brink of the point of no return. This greedy model is not only impacting our physical health. This model is behind an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe that is forcing millions to migrate, converting the Mediterranean sea and Atlantic ocean in massive graveyards. Intensive farming, xenobiotics and the current biomedical research model are examples that place the human being as a causative, etiological agent for many of the current stressors that affect human and nonhuman animals, plants and other living organisms on earth. The Global Exposome project mission is to investigate the role of the environment in different health conditions through open science and cruelty-free research. Most importantly, our project is about educating individuals with scientific evidence. If there is still a chance to avoid extinction, it will be through collaboration, compassion and empathy in every aspect of our society.

• Luis Falcón / GNU Solidario

Opendx28: Open-Source Health App Ecosystem - Modular SaaS for Epidemic Alerts & Tech Education

The OpenDx28 project will be showcased, starting with its goal on the utilization of open-source healthcare applications as cloud services. Initially aimed at providing partners with access to these tools, the project later integrated applications such as GNU Health, DHIS2, Orthanc, and 3D Slicer, all made accessible via a web browser through containerization. As the project progressed, teaching experiences were tailored based on feedback from partners, leading to more effective knowledge transfer and application use. Subsequent developments included the establishment of the 3D Slicer Hub and the integration of indicators for DHIS2 dashboards, supported by ETL processes from GNU Health to DHIS2. As the project evolved, ideas for enhancements emerged. These encompassed the potential creation of a "platformer" based on Helm for distinct tenant deployments and the introduction of a Single Sign-On (SSO) system.

• Paula Moreno Fajardo / Instituto Tecnológico de Canarias (ITC)

Breast Cancer Screening - How AI, GNU Health and Orthanc help

Screening programs for Breast Cancer require a high number ofprofessionals. vara, a Berlin-based company, has developed anAI-powered solution for screening of mammography images, that is used already in Germany, Egypt, Mexico and India. It significantly reduces the workload of a radiologist. While Orthanc is used for modality management, GNU Health manages the patient registration, referrals and analysis. AXXITE was asked to support the GNU Health customizing. In this talk I will describe the overall solution as well as the extentions that we have made for GNU Health

• Axel Braun / Axxite