News & Updates

“I have a passion to help sick people,” says Oteng Gaopatwe, a nurse at Nyangabgwe Referral Hospital in Francistown, Botswana. “One thing I like most about my job is to see my clients satisfied, having a smile, and seeing all the people I have helped being relieved of their pain,” he says. Frontline health workers like Oteng are the backbone of health systems. In order to plan effectively for training, recruitment, and retention, countries need...

At the Global mHealth Forum in December, one session stood out to me in substance and approach: it was on a collaborative effort called OpenHIE. Skipping over all the technical parts of the acronym, OpenHIE is a set of technologies that allows data systems to talk to each other. In my line of work, the data systems are registries: lists of clients, health workers, and health facilities. Each registry uses the same terms (ideally) to share data...

Like many of his fellow Ghanaians, Obeng Asomaning wanted to use his skills to help his country. As a new graduate with a degree in health service planning and management, he landed a job at the Ministry of Health’s Regional Health Office in Ashanti Region. Quickly he saw that the office was struggling to access information about the health workforce. How many midwives worked in the regional hospital? How many vacancies were there in Kwabre...

A couple of months ago, Dykki Settle walked into my office. He had been talking with colleagues at mPowering Frontline Health Workers about marshaling a response to the Ebola outbreaks in West Africa—perhaps creating webinars and an online information resource for health workers. Now, I played a minor role in the online training response to the anthrax attacks in 2001. I could sense that the job was larger than anyone else understood at that...

iHRIS and human resource for health information systems(HRIS) like it play a critical role in managing health workforce data. However, curating and maintaining data for the sake of it is not the goal. Using data to inform decisions is one of the primary objectives of the system. The USAID led Capacity Plus project led by IntraHealth recently published a technical brief on the subject and the iHRIS Community believes it is worth sharing.A strong...

IntraHealth International and UNICEF are joining forces to help Liberia’s Ministry of Health and Social Welfare communicate with health workers in real time as the country fights to contain the Ebola outbreak. We are combining two existing technologies—IntraHealth’s iHRIS software and UNICEF’s UNICEF’s mobile phone SMS platform—into a powerful communication tool called mHero (Mobile Health Worker Ebola Response and Outreach). mHero will allow the...

A few months ago, I traveled to Liberia for the DHIS 2 & iHRIS Interoperability Academy, where we worked with West African developers, Ministry of Health and Social Welfare officials, and human resources managers on using health information system data to improve family planning services. I didn’t realize at the time that those technologies were going to play a key role in Liberia’s Ebola response.Today I can’t help but think about my colleagues...

We know that iHRIS helps save lives by allowing countries to place health workers where and when they are most needed. But it also saves money. A lot of money.Annually iHRIS gives the 19 nations that use its open source software the opportunity to save $177 million. Without iHRIS, that money would be spent on licensing fees alone.That’s money that iHRIS nations can reinvest in their people, systems, and infrastructure to improve the health and...

If you're not convinced that open source is right for global health and development then talk with Herman Fung. Herman, a VSO volunteer who spent nearly two years in Malawi working at the Ministry of Health on a health systems strengthening project funded by Tropical Health and Education Trust (THET) is a strong proponent of iHRIS and open source software. At the request of the Ministry of Health, Herman and five other volunteers implemented...

These programmers see the light, embrace international standards for the Zimbabwe Ministry of Health and Child Care’s new national health worker registry. The registry is a database that will pull together a basic set of data on health workers from various information systems in the country. Once the data are available, health leaders can use them to make all kinds of decisions that can improve the health of Zimbabweans—from influencing health...