In Rwanda we are exploring the possibility of paying community health workers incentive payments (PBF) via Mobile Money for effectively tracking pregnant women using the RapidSMS system. For example those who reported an average of 7 or more pregnancy-related messages per pregnant woman reported would receive a certain amount, while those reporting 4-6 would get less, and 3 or less would get no incentive payment.
We have already worked out how to transfer the data into the DHIS-2 from RapidSMS (updating phone number lists and importing datavalues to calculate the average number of pregnancy related messages per community health worker), but we’re not sure if DHIS-2 supports sending of USSD messages that are used for mobile banking transactions. Has anyone done this before?
Alternately, we could generate a report and send as an Excel sheet to the mobile carriers and have them initiate the transfers, but would then need a way to import the confirmation of payments back into the system since I suppose people with broken phones would not be able to receive their payments even if they are sent.
This is still at the discussion stage, but we would like to build on experiences of those who may have tried this before.
Randy Wilson
Senior HMIS and Data Use Advisor, Ministry of Health/Rwanda
in Zambia they have set up a partly manual system to reimburse/incentivize reporters for the Malaria program. I guess they can give the details as they are also on the list.
In general I can say that we don’t have a USSD connection directly from DHIS2, though we are very keen to investigate the whole area of reimbursement etc as part of the DHIS mobile project. We would need the DHIS2 server to have a mobile modem supporting USSD/SMS.
Those who were implementing this in Zambia found that there were no standardized interfaces for doing this reimbursement on the network side, and the way they got around it I think was to install a mobile modem which could do SMS and USSD, and use an external program to run through a list of USSD/SMS commands (these were generated by a custom script in DHIS2). They are doing this on a different machine than the one that hosts DHIS2. Depending on the hosting situation and which OS the gateway-software runs on, it may be easier to do as they have done. To generate scripts on DHIS2 which are run on another machine that has network connectivity for SMS/USSD.
In Rwanda we are exploring the possibility of paying community health workers incentive payments (PBF) via Mobile Money for effectively tracking pregnant women using the RapidSMS system. For example those who reported an average of 7 or more pregnancy-related messages per pregnant woman reported would receive a certain amount, while those reporting 4-6 would get less, and 3 or less would get no incentive payment.
We have already worked out how to transfer the data into the DHIS-2 from RapidSMS (updating phone number lists and importing datavalues to calculate the average number of pregnancy related messages per community health worker), but we’re not sure if DHIS-2 supports sending of USSD messages that are used for mobile banking transactions. Has anyone done this before?
Alternately, we could generate a report and send as an Excel sheet to the mobile carriers and have them initiate the transfers, but would then need a way to import the confirmation of payments back into the system since I suppose people with broken phones would not be able to receive their payments even if they are sent.
This is still at the discussion stage, but we would like to build on experiences of those who may have tried this before.
Randy Wilson
Senior HMIS and Data Use Advisor, Ministry of Health/Rwanda
Hi Randy,
I have started work on interfacing one of our DHIS2 instances with the API of a local service provider here in Zambia which provides “talk time”. As Lars points out, we have been using a somewhat manual system before, whereby we generated special reports on the DHIS2 server, which were uploaded to a local service provider which handles the distribution of talk time. The service provider has begun to offer an API to allow integration directly from external applications. So, what we plan on doing is instead of users getting their talk time at the end of the month based on their reports, they will get it immediately.
This is not directly sending a USSD code, but rather hooking into an existing API of a service provider. This has a number of advantages, esepcially for accountancy and reconcilation purposes. Not really sure what the possibilities are in Rwanda though, but I would start with the manual system first if you can, and then work towards eventual direct integration.
Regards,
Jason
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On Wed, Dec 18, 2013 at 10:25 AM, Lars Kristian Roland lars@roland.bz wrote:
Hi,
in Zambia they have set up a partly manual system to reimburse/incentivize reporters for the Malaria program. I guess they can give the details as they are also on the list.
In general I can say that we don’t have a USSD connection directly from DHIS2, though we are very keen to investigate the whole area of reimbursement etc as part of the DHIS mobile project. We would need the DHIS2 server to have a mobile modem supporting USSD/SMS.
Those who were implementing this in Zambia found that there were no standardized interfaces for doing this reimbursement on the network side, and the way they got around it I think was to install a mobile modem which could do SMS and USSD, and use an external program to run through a list of USSD/SMS commands (these were generated by a custom script in DHIS2). They are doing this on a different machine than the one that hosts DHIS2. Depending on the hosting situation and which OS the gateway-software runs on, it may be easier to do as they have done. To generate scripts on DHIS2 which are run on another machine that has network connectivity for SMS/USSD.
In Rwanda we are exploring the possibility of paying community health workers incentive payments (PBF) via Mobile Money for effectively tracking pregnant women using the RapidSMS system. For example those who reported an average of 7 or more pregnancy-related messages per pregnant woman reported would receive a certain amount, while those reporting 4-6 would get less, and 3 or less would get no incentive payment.
We have already worked out how to transfer the data into the DHIS-2 from RapidSMS (updating phone number lists and importing datavalues to calculate the average number of pregnancy related messages per community health worker), but we’re not sure if DHIS-2 supports sending of USSD messages that are used for mobile banking transactions. Has anyone done this before?
Alternately, we could generate a report and send as an Excel sheet to the mobile carriers and have them initiate the transfers, but would then need a way to import the confirmation of payments back into the system since I suppose people with broken phones would not be able to receive their payments even if they are sent.
This is still at the discussion stage, but we would like to build on experiences of those who may have tried this before.
Randy Wilson
Senior HMIS and Data Use Advisor, Ministry of Health/Rwanda
Perhaps there could be some lessons learned from the work done in Tanzania using USSD for IDSR reporting directly into DHIS2. Ismail can provide more details on that specific solution.
Knut
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On Wed, Dec 18, 2013 at 9:19 AM, Wilson,Randy rwilson@msh.org wrote:
In Rwanda we are exploring the possibility of paying community health workers incentive payments (PBF) via Mobile Money for effectively tracking pregnant women using the RapidSMS system. For example those who reported an average of 7 or more pregnancy-related messages per pregnant woman reported would receive a certain amount, while those reporting 4-6 would get less, and 3 or less would get no incentive payment.
We have already worked out how to transfer the data into the DHIS-2 from RapidSMS (updating phone number lists and importing datavalues to calculate the average number of pregnancy related messages per community health worker), but we’re not sure if DHIS-2 supports sending of USSD messages that are used for mobile banking transactions. Has anyone done this before?
Alternately, we could generate a report and send as an Excel sheet to the mobile carriers and have them initiate the transfers, but would then need a way to import the confirmation of payments back into the system since I suppose people with broken phones would not be able to receive their payments even if they are sent.
This is still at the discussion stage, but we would like to build on experiences of those who may have tried this before.
Randy Wilson
Senior HMIS and Data Use Advisor, Ministry of Health/Rwanda