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.
Kabelo Bitsang, iHRIS administrator for the Botswana Ministry of Health, learned to maintain and customize the iHRIS software through studying documentation online, working with CapacityPlus developers both in-country and remotely, and attending a training in Ghana. He came from a Microsoft Windows background and learned to work in a Linux environment, the required operating system for iHRIS. “I mostly learned from trial and error and just asking as many questions as possible,” he noted in a recent interview.
Many countries, like Botswana, are adopting CapacityPlus’s Open Source iHRIS Manage and iHRIS Qualify software and have successfully modified the software to meet their specific needs. CapacityPlus, along with other IntraHealth International-led projects, provides assistance to several of these countries to install and adapt the software and develop custom reports. As more countries began to independently implement the software, the iHRIS team identified the need to build in-country skills in the information and communications technology required to administer the software.
Meeting in-country demands
The newly launched iHRIS Administrator: Level 1 eLearning course, developed for CapacityPlus’s HRH Global Resource Center (GRC), will help to address this need without the traditional—and costly—in-country technical assistance. It is a free, self-paced course that provides the skills needed to install, maintain, and customize the software. It also includes information on data standardization and data quality—key to fostering trust and use of data.
An insider’s view
Since December, I’ve been the project manager for the course development process, though the effort to build the GRC eLearning platform has been underway for approximately two years. One aspect that I’m excited about is the ability to build custom reports to facilitate health worker data analysis. Although the iHRIS software installation comes with a number of standard reports, the iHRIS team often receives requests for help creating custom reports.
The Custom Reports module walks students through the step-by-step process of creating a new report, starting with joining database forms and fields and ending with the student selecting a default display for end users. For students who learn best by watching, there is a video with a voiceover and screen capture.
The course also includes exercises for students to connect with the iHRIS developer community, so they can ask for help or contribute code and language translations.
Future developments
Though the course is newly launched, we have already received requests for an advanced iHRIS administrator course. This new direction helps to meet the goals of the iHRIS team to build local capacity for the iHRIS software, as well as diversify and expand the iHRIS developer community.
Like the iHRIS software and Moodle-based eLearning platform, the course content is open and can be freely modified and reused. We hope that countries will adapt it for their needs for their own courses and other types of trainings. Already, Dr. Juma Lungo of the University of Dar es Salaam has used the draft content and modified it for training 63 officers supporting Tanzania’s iHRIS Manage system. And in the coming months, Kabelo Bitsang plans to enroll four new iHRIS officers in the course.
The first iHRIS eLearning course is now available!
CapacityPlus’s HRH Global Resource Center recently announced the launch of its eLearning program. The GRC will now offer free courses developed by technical experts in the fields of HRH, health informatics, and health service delivery to build the capacity of country-based users in critical skills development.
The first course developed for the GRC eLearning program is an iHRIS administrator training. The course was collaboratively developed with the iHRIS team and is based on training materials created by Carl Leitner and field-tested in Ghana and Tanzania
The iHRIS Administrator – Level 1 course will provide skills needed to install, maintain, and customize the iHRIS software. It will include an introduction to LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) architecture, instructions on installing and administering an Ubuntu operating system, information on data standardization and data quality, and instructions on creating custom reports. Students who complete the course will receive a certificate. The course follows the Health Information Building Blocks (HIBBs) model and is comprised of short modules that can be freely reused and modified for future courses or other types of trainings.
Future GRC course offerings will include topics such as monitoring and evaluation, gender issues in HRH, and using a rapid discrete choice experiment (DCE) tool for determining health workers’ motivational and retention preferences.
Visit the new GRC eLearning page to sign up for the iHRIS Administrator course!
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