CapacityPlus Contributes to eHealth Workshop in Ethiopia
Last month, our iHRIS team lead, Dykki Settle, participated in the Ethiopian eHealth Standards and Interoperability Workshop in Addis Ababa at the invitation of the World Health Organization. The workshop was hosted by the Federal Ministry of Health of Ethiopia and the WHO.
In collaboration with development partners, the Ministry of Health has already embarked on several eHealth initiatives, including health management information systems, electronic medical records, human resources information systems (HRIS), and telemedicine. The Ministry organized the workshop as a step toward developing appropriate health informatics standards and an architectural framework to ensure interoperability and scalability of these initiatives, as well as to focus on capacity-building of Ministry staff to foster sustainability.
Settle demonstrated our iHRIS Suite of free, Open Source software for planning and managing the health workforce:
• iHRIS Qualify tracks health worker training, certification, and licensure
• iHRIS Manage maintains personnel deployment, performance, and attrition information
• iHRIS Plan models long-term health workforce needs
• iHRIS Retain (forthcoming) costs retention strategies to be implemented at the district, regional, or national level.
He also cofacilitated two sessions: Regional experiences with eHealth and standards implementation: The path towards interoperability and enterprise architecture and Data standards and registries, and served as a rapporteur in a session on Regional and global health observatories.
During the workshop, participants discussed the needed infrastructure for health information systems (HIS); set priorities and identified steps necessary for completing an implementation strategy; increased their understanding of the importance of adopting national HIS standards; and learned about the purpose of an interoperability framework to support the implementation of priority HIS interventions.