Part of the Interoperability DAC2021 Session: Wednesday 23nd June 14:00
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In many LMICs, DHIS2 is the first essential brick of the national health information system. Often designed as a data warehouse, it offers powerful functionalities for presenting aggregated data.
The reliability and performance of a system like DHIS2 is therefore largely based on the characteristics of the data it contains: reliability, completeness and timeliness.
Unfortunately, in LMICs, data is collected in complex environments, often preventing these three characteristics from being met. The paper-based reporting systems that still largely prevail at the peripheral level are a difficult barrier to overcome in order to systematically and reliably collect the data that feeds into the DHIS2.
In Burkina Faso, the Ministry of Health and Terre des hommes Lausanne have implemented an approach based on digital tools to improve the quality of care at the peripheral level. This is the Integrated e-Diagnostic Approach, IeDA. Maternal, neonatal and under-five health consultations are conducted on a tablet using a digital tool that assists the health worker in the consultation, identification of symptoms, diagnosis and establishment of an appropriate treatment. More than 300 variables are collected during an IMCI consultation, for example, and then transmitted to a central server as soon as the tablet is in a data coverage area. This robust and reliable system equips nearly 85% of the country’s health centers, making IeDA the reference approach for IMCI consultations, and soon for pregnant women and mothers’ consultations.
This reliable and prompt data collected through IeDA constitutes the individual raw data essential to the functioning of DHIS2.
Early on, the Ministry of Health of Burkina Faso wished to interconnect IeDA and its DHIS2 to enable the storage of data collected at the peripheral level. Terre des hommes carried out this interconnection and automatically transmits to DHIS2 nearly 60 IMCI indicators for more than 1700 health centers, and soon the totality.
This successful integration between IeDA and DHIS2, using the Motech module, shows the complementarity of these two platforms, whose vocations are different (one collects individual data, the other stores and visualizes aggregated data), but related.
Terre des hommes Lausanne proposes to present this usecase and demonstrate the relevance of complementary approaches like IeDA/DHIS2 in the reliability of national health information systems.