About iHRIS

iHRIS Health Workforce Information Systems Software

iHRIS, IntraHealth International’s free, open source software, helps countries around the world track and manage their health workforce data to improve access to services. Countries use it to capture and maintain high-quality information for health workforce planning, management, regulation, and training.

iHRIS is built on a flexible framework that allows ministries of health, professional councils, and health service delivery organizations to adapt applications for a wide variety of uses. Developed in collaboration with national stakeholders beginning in 2005, with support from USAID, iHRIS is used in more than 20 countries to manage over a million health worker records at a potential cost savings of over $275 million when compared to commercial software.

Key Approaches

iHRIS has been developed into multiple, interoperable applications to meet the needs of a variety of stakeholders and support health workers throughout their life cycle:

  • iHRIS Manage allows tracking and management of health workers actively engaged in service delivery
  • iHRIS Qualify enables professional councils and associations to register, license, and regulate health workers to support increased quality of care
  • iHRIS Plan projects the likely changes in the health workforce under different scenarios and compares them with projected needs
  • iHRIS Retain, developed in collaboration with the World Health Organization, helps countries plan and cost recruitment and retention interventions
  • iHRIS Train assists in tracking and managing health worker preservice education pipelines and in-service training.

Global Support Community: We open access to iHRIS through publishing the software, source code, and other resources at www.ihris.org and by supporting a global community of software developers and information technologists with an online forum and interactive discussions and training sessions. The community raises and resolves technical issues on its own; contributes code to iHRIS; provides tools, guidance, and case studies for the iHRIS Implementation Toolkit; and translates iHRIS applications into other languages.

International Standards and Interoperability: iHRIS conforms to a variety of international standards for data exchange to ensure that data that might otherwise be siloed are accessible to all parts of a health system. We worked with an international standards organization, Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise, to develop a new global standard for exchanging health worker information. In addition, IntraHealth has collaborated in the Open Health Information Exchange (OpenHIE) initiative, including leading the development of a health worker registry that enables countries to link the various systems (including iHRIS) in their health information architecture.