- This will be used to support the development of the Learning Experience Platform (LXP) for the WHO Academy, the organisation’s new state-of-the-art training centre
- As part of the initiative, the WHO Information Management and Technology team was invested in adopting new Agile methodology, lean product development and DevOps practices
Red Hat, Inc has announced it is working with the World Health Organization (WHO), the specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for international public health, to create a sustainable open source development infrastructure. This will be used to support the development of the Learning Experience Platform (LXP) for the WHO Academy, the organisation’s new state-of-the-art training centre.
It used modern development practices from Red Hat Open Innovation Labs, Open Practice Library, and open source technologies from Red Hat community projects. WHO built a scalable, more flexible DevOps platform to help with activities like managing, testing builds, analyzing code, and data visualisation, to enable faster access to relevant healthcare knowledge and to reduce misinformation.
Hans Roth, senior vice president and general manager, Global Services, Red Hat said, “The World Health Organisation has long led the way when it comes to creating innovative solutions for public health resources. It was an honor to work with the WHO on developing an open source platform that has the potential to shape how the world responds not only to the COVID crisis, but to future healthcare adversity. With the help of Red Hat Open Innovation Labs, the WHO broke down traditional IT barriers by replacing them with DevOps practices and solved challenges through collaboration, hard work and innovative thinking. Ultimately, the agency, along with Red Hat’s support, has created a robust DevOps platform that can more efficiently provide knowledge to healthcare professionals around the world.”
Health workers’ future needs
WHO said that its s new DevOps platform addresses the ability to respond to current challenges like combating misinformation, gaining additional skills to establish a new learning experience platform. WHO also sought to lay the groundwork for an open data model that can meet health workers’ future needs, including offering more personalised learning experiences.
They further said, “During an eight-week virtual residency with Red Hat Open Innovation Labs, the WHO team worked collaboratively with Red Hat experts. Red Hat Open Innovation Labs aim to help organizations integrate people, practices and technology to increase agility in the development of software and products, catalyze innovation and solve internal challenges in an accelerated time frame.”
As part of the initiative, the WHO Information Management and Technology team was invested in adopting new Agile methodology, lean product development and DevOps practices, in parallel to its existing more traditional project management approach. WHo said that the skills and tools gained from the Red Hat Open Innovation Labs engagement has helped lay the foundation for a learning solution that isn’t tied to a single person or technology.
Adopt emerging architectures and applications iteratively and incrementally
The new LXP will be run entirely on Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud technologies, offering WHO a scalable, flexible and more secure platform. Red Hat OpenShift provides the cloud-native foundation, a streamlined environment for building and deploying containerised applications and capabilities for assessing application metrics.
Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces is also being used to provide LXP developers a fast and reliable Kubernetes development foundation. WHO said that by basing LXP on an open technology framework, it is better able to adopt emerging architectures and applications iteratively and incrementally, providing real-time value to global health workers. In addition, Red Hat OpenShift, as a cloud agnostic Kubernetes platform, enables WHO to scale the LXP as demand grows without dependency on any particular cloud vendor.
Bernardo Mariano, chief information officer and director, Digital Health, The World Health Organisation said, “Working with Red Hat Open Innovation Labs provided a more flexible and responsive approach for creating solutions using open source technologies. We were able to build a DevOps platform that can not only deliver relevant, timely COVID-related information and knowledge to health workers globally, but one that can also scale and adapt to their future needs.”
