A Brief Guide to iHRIS Qualify

To ensure that the right health care provider is in the right place with the right skills, countries require current, accurate data on human resources for health (HRH). A strong human resources information system (HRIS) enables health care leaders to quickly answer the key policy and management questions affecting service delivery. The Capacity Project has developed the iHRIS Suite, an integrated suite of free, Open Source HRIS solutions to supply health sector leaders with the information they need to assess HR problems, plan effective interventions and evaluate those interventions.

iHRIS Qualify is the health professional training, licensing and certification component of the iHRIS Suite. A licensing or certification authority for a health worker cadre (nurses, physicians, etc.) can use iHRIS Qualify to track, maintain and analyze data on a country's entire health workforce.

Benefits of iHRIS Qualify

iHRIS Qualify captures and aggregates data on a complete cadre of health workers. The database collects information about health professionals from the time they enter pre-service training through registration and licensure. iHRIS Qualify can also track deployments, issue licenses for private practice clinics and record out-migration verification requests. Thus, it provides a country-level picture of a cadre of health workers, whether in training, employed in the public sector or working in the private sector.

A policy-maker can analyze the data captured by iHRIS Qualify to answer critical HR policy and management questions, such as:

  • How many trained students pass the certification/accreditation exam?
  • Of the students who pass the exam, how many register to practice?
  • How many health workers are deployed in each region, and where are they working?
  • How many health workers are working in the public sector, private sector or both?
  • Are health professionals meeting their continuing education requirements?
  • For what reasons are health workers out-migrating to work in other countries?

iHRIS Qualify is typically managed by the licensing or certification authority for a health worker cadre. This authority is usually an autonomous council that regulates the registration, operations and conduct of a cadre of health professionals within a country's health workforce. The council may be charged with enforcing minimum qualifications for students entering training programs, administering national-level examinations that qualify a graduating student to practice within the country, verifying that continuing medical education requirements have been completed before renewing licenses, issuing private practice licenses to qualified health professionals, verifying qualifications of foreign-trained health workers applying to work within the country and verifying qualifications of health workers applying to work in foreign countries. The council can use iHRIS Qualify to capture, update and report on data from all of these activities.

Typically, separate authorities regulate doctors, dentists, nurses, pharmacists and allied health professionals. Each separate authority can maintain its own iHRIS Qualify system, but data from all systems may be aggregated to provide a complete picture of the country's health workforce.

iHRIS Qualify Features

iHRIS Qualify consists of several modules designed to store and report health professional information. Using modules as "building blocks" for the system makes it easier to add more features as needs change or disable unnecessary features.

The following modules were released in version 3 of iHRIS Qualify (currently available for download):

  • System Configuration: Install, enable and configure modules to easily customize the system and its features from a web-based configuration screen.
  • User Management: Create and manage password-protected user accounts to control access to the system. Accounts are role-based so that unauthorized user actions and data sets are hidden from the user.
  • Database Management: Design a standard data structure by creating lists of items to be tracked, such as geographical locations, cadres and training institutions.
  • Records Management: Record information about each health worker, such as citizenship, marital status, birth date, contact information, educational qualifications and identification numbers.
  • Pre-Service Training Management: Track students entering pre-service training programs and monitor completion rates as well as reasons for training disruption.
  • Examination Management: Track applications and results for national-level certification examinations.
  • Registration and Licensing Management: Issue registration numbers, licenses and license renewals, track deployments, manage out-migration requests and record disciplinary actions.
  • Custom Reporting: Aggregate, analyze and export data in a variety of ways to answer key management and policy questions, and generate facility lists and health worker directories.

The following features ensure security and accuracy of data stored in the system:

  • Error checking and data correction by authorized data managers to ensure data integrity
  • Automated logging of username, date and time when data are entered or changed, for auditing purposes
  • Permanent archiving of all data changes to ensure a consistent record of each person's work history.

The Capacity Project also released a Windows-based version of iHRIS Qualify. This version is intended for use in areas that don't have a reliable Internet connection or where a single-user desktop version is needed, such as in a local office.

Planned for later releases of iHRIS Qualify are multilingual versions, data import and export and integration with geographic information systems.

Related Systems

iHRIS Qualify is extensible to the Capacity Project's other iHRIS products:

  • iHRIS Manage, a human resource management system
  • iHRIS Plan, workforce planning and modeling software.

Working together, the three components of the iHRIS Suite provide a powerful feedback loop for analyzing, planning and managing health workforce resources and needs.

For more detailed information about our products and our work, visit www.capacityproject.org/hris. To learn about our implementation process, please see A Brief Guide to the iHRIS Software Suite. To learn more about our individual software products, see our other one-page guides:


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