Notes from the Health Informatics Architect

About

Sun, 01 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’m Ved Prakash, a Java and J2EE architect with 18+ years of experience building enterprise-grade, cloud-native applications — with deep specialisation in health interoperability standards including HL7 FHIR (R4/R5), openEHR, IHE integration profiles, and clinical terminology systems (SNOMED CT, LOINC, ICD-10/11).

I currently serve as CTO of dChikitsa Private Limited and Co-Founder & CTO of Akhester Technologies, leading architecture and delivery of open, standards-compliant digital health platforms for national and international healthcare markets — including my current role as Solutions Architect on a UNOPS-contracted national digital health platform in Sri Lanka (HAPI FHIR, IHE XDS.b/ATNA/BALP, NEHR/NHDX alignment).

Projects

Sun, 01 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A selection of the national digital health platforms, open-source infrastructure, and commercial products I’ve architected and built.

National & Government Platforms Link to heading

Digital Health Platform — Ministry of Health and Mass Media, Sri Lanka (UNOPS) Solutions Architect on a UNOPS-contracted national digital health programme, spanning three workstreams:

Digital Health Information Warehouse — secondary-use data warehouse for population health analytics
Platform Support Services — generic, reusable FOSS components shared across the national platform
Document and Imaging Repository — a HAPI FHIR JPA document repository (ITI-65 Provide Document Bundle, ITI-67 Find Document References, ITI-68 Retrieve Document, ITI-105) paired with an Orthanc DICOMweb server (STOW-RS, WADO-RS, QIDO-RS) and a Record Locator service resolving cross-facility document and imaging pointers at national scale — with PDPA-compliant consent enforcement, SHA-256 document integrity verification, and IHE ATNA/BALP-compliant audit logging, aligned to Sri Lanka’s national NEHR/NHDX systems

This work sits on an open-source stack throughout — HAPI FHIR, Orthanc, and SeaweedFS object storage — chosen deliberately so the Ministry owns and can run the infrastructure without vendor lock-in.

Videos

Sun, 01 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Talks, walkthroughs, and technical deep-dives on health interoperability, FHIR, and digital health architecture.

OpenMRS Patient Examination — Walkthrough An example of how patient examination is taken and recorded in OpenMRS.

Why I'm Writing This Blog

Sun, 01 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The gap I kept noticing Link to heading

Interoperability projects generate an enormous amount of knowledge — lessons learned the hard way, trade-offs debated in meeting rooms, workarounds that eventually became best practice. Almost none of it is written down in a form anyone outside the project ever reads. What does get documented is usually formal, sanitized, and locked inside project reports that exist to satisfy a funder, not to teach.

Why We Run a Dual FHIR + openEHR Architecture (And What It Actually Costs)

Sun, 01 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On paper, the pitch for a dual-model clinical data architecture is clean: use openEHR archetypes for structured, meaning-preserving clinical documentation, and HL7 FHIR resources for interoperable exchange. Two models, each doing what it’s best at. I’ve built this pattern more than once now — across an open-source Patient Management System and EMR, a health information exchange platform, and a national Hospital Information System — and it’s worth being honest about what it buys you and what it costs.