News & Updates

On my trip to India last month, I didn’t plan to focus on maternal health care, but walking through the maternity ward in Bihar, I couldn’t help but worry about the long lines and hours that keep a woman waiting to see a doctor. The health officials I met with are incredibly committed to serving their communities. In one case, I actually had to walk through the maternity ward to reach my meeting with members of the chief surgeon’s office and the...

Friday was the last day of the Western African HIS Unconference and Training Workshop, and what a wrap-up for the week it was!The day began with a joint presentation by Patrick Whitaker and Bob Jolliffe on using SDMX-HD as the means for transferring data between different components of an integrated health information system. Bob and Ryan Crichton then proceeded with a live demonstration of:• Importing indicators from the IMR into DHIS2 •...

Thursday was the last full day of training. In the iHRIS tract, we started with an amazing presentation by Dr. Ly from Mali.We have not been working with the MOH in Mali, and we learned earlier this week that he found the iHRIS software, and together with his team was able to customize it quite significantly including adding French translations, a Self-Service model, and other new functionality.Following this, Prof. Kayode Odusote , Director of...

Today, Wednesday, is our second day of training. We have one more full day tomorrow, and hopefully more on Friday. I think we all could have easily spent two weeks here based on everyone's interest and enthusiasm. What is particularly amazing to me is the engagement of the HR Managers and HR Directors, even though the material has gotten, at times, pretty heady with technical information. It shows that they really care about how the human...

Today is Tuesday and the second day of the unconference, where everyone really focused on training. We split into three main tracts for the training: one on DHIS , one on iHRIS and one on openMRS and open ELIS .As this is a western African regional conference, we have both French and English speakers. A huge thanks goes out to Romain Tohouri who provided excellent translation to and from French. This is pretty amazing when you think that the...

Today is the first day of the workshop. I have already met several people that I have only talked to online. I am also excited to meet many new people interested in what we are doing.Dorothy Gordon, the Director-General of the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence (KACE) in ICT, opened the session with a great speech. Tomorrow is a national holiday for Ghana's first President, who was a Pan-African and the conference is Pan-African. Open...

I am waiting at the airport for my flight to Accra and I am very excited about the upcoming health information system (HIS) unconference hosted at the Kofi Annan Centre for Excellence - AITI with support from WAHO and HMN . While many participants will be from the ECOWAS member states, we also have some iHRIS developers from Botswana and Lesotho. My suitcase has been checked with two iHRIS Appliances, a host of books donated by O'Reilly , and...

Open Source and Global Health UnConference Focuses on Health Information Systems in West AfricaSeptember 20–24, Accra, GhanaThe West African Health Organization (WAHO), WHO, the University of Oslo, Health Metrics Network (HMN) and the IntraHealth International-led USAID-funded CapacityPlus project have joined forces to organize an “unconference” in Accra, Ghana, next week to strengthen health information systems capacity throughout West Africa...

Capacity Plus has been working closely with the West African Health Organization (WAHO) and its Director for HR Development, Professor Kayode Odusote, to provide virtual assistance for its HRIS strengthening in member countries. WAHO recently completed a pilot of iHRIS Manage in Ghana and is now supporting the Nursing and Midwifery Council of Nigeria to implement iHRIS Qualify.Aware that the Council was interested in computerizing its registry...

The University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) received awards for their exhibit at the 34 th Dar es Salaam International Trade Fare on July 7, also known as Sabasaba (‘saba’ means ‘seven’ in Swahili). The exhibit included several innovative works created or supported by UDSM affiliates, and showcased Tanzania’s customized iHRIS Manage software. UDSM won two trophies, one as the second overall winner of exhibitors and a second as the best in the category...