News & Updates

The migration of health workers continues to be a hot topic in the healthcare world. The WHO’s 2006 World Health Report cited a global shortage of 4.3 million health workers. This shortage is concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, which has 25% of the global burden of disease but only 3% of the world’s health workforce. The departure of health workers from their country of training often presents a significant cost to that country. The primary...

Sarah Dwyer, communications officer for Capacity Project, and I recently completed a short video about the Capacity Project’s HRIS strengthening work in Uganda. The piece, “From Kampala to the Districts: Linking Data, Saving Lives,” focuses on the importance of having accurate data on the health workforce and specifically highlights nurses as they make up the largest cadre in the country. Here is a short description of the video: Nurses Margaret...

On June 12 at the PEPFAR Implementers Meeting in Windhoek, Namibia, the Capacity Project’s Samwel Wakibi presented results of the evaluation of the Project’s human resources information systems (HRIS) implementation. Wakibi shared findings and concluded that the Project’s approach impacts country-level health systems by increasing efficiency, data accuracy and quality as well as transparency of HR issues. The presentation generated rich...

The HRIS Strengthening Knowledge Base on our wiki is a resource for anyone who is strengthening human resources information systems or using the iHRIS software. We have recently expanded the knowledge base with several new articles on data coding and the software development process. In addition, we have added new tools to aid with software development and customization, including an Issues Log tool, a Project Control List tool and a Test Case...

Through the Capacity Project, IntraHealth has been working in Kenya and Tanzania to improve their capacity in human resources for health (HRH), including strengthening their HR information systems. Two USAID associate awards—Capacity Kenya and the Tanzania Human Resource Capacity Project—will allow IntraHealth to build upon the successes of the Capacity Project. Capacity Kenya will continue to roll out the HRIS, among other HRH initiatives. The...

Technical and end user documentation for our iHRIS Suite of HR information systems has recently been updated and significantly expanded. All of our documentation is posted on our wiki, which is open to all iHRIS users. This documentation may also be printed as PDFs for your reference.Here is what you'll find on the wiki now: iHRIS Documentation and User Manuals: Intended for end users and system administrators, the user manuals provide...

In Rwanda, iHRIS Manage implementation has continued to make progress. Since May 2009, Capacity Staff have held meetings with users and MOH partners to refine expectations for the system. In response to user requests, new reports have been developed for regular use by decision-makers, and further reports are under development. The MOH has ordered several servers for the system, including one that will be dedicated as a back-up server for the data...

This list of 50 successful Open Source projects that are changing medicine was posted on the Medicine 3.0 blog back in February, but it just recently came to our attention. Of course, we are happy that iHRIS is listed under the Medical Practice Management Software section. But this list is also a great resource of interesting open source development projects that fill niches other than health worker HR information systems or otherwise complement...

We are pleased to announce the release of a major upgrade to iHRIS Manage. You may download iHRIS Manage 4.0.0 and all supporting software from the Launchpad hosting site (or go to the Software Download page).Several enhancements are included in this release: Customize any field name display (change "district" to "state," for example) Create customized roles and assign specific tasks to those roles Export selected standard data lists, for use in...

Here are some photos from the iHRIS Manage usability testing that the HRIS team has been conducting over the last several months (see blog from last week for more information).The following photos were taken at the recent Capacity Project HRIS/DDDM workshop in April in Arusha, Tanzania. Several HRIS team members facilitated concurrent sessions with workshop participants, allowing more people to test the software. Here are some stills from video...