This abstract has been accepted at the 2024 DHIS2 Annual Conference
DHIS2 as a tool to support malaria data management in a complex emergency in Venezuela
Venezuela’s Ministry of Health (MoH) decided to use DHIS2 to manage Malaria National Program (NMP) data in 2020 and approved it accordingly. In 2021, the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO) supported this initiative through an external consulting team, which resulted in expensive and untimely. In 2023, the NMP took an audacious step, assigning its engineering team to lead the DHIS2 national instance setup. The priority was to support the response to a national and regional emergency in the continent due to the unusual increase in malaria cases in this country, providing quality data to NMP local, state, and national teams to make informed and prompt decisions. Currently, malaria data management is grounded on paper forms that are digitized in local data-entry points and sent to regional and central levels in MS Excel, using e-mail or WhatsApp communication services. This approach has several issues related to data quality, confidentiality, and opportunity. After verifying that DHIS2 complies with national regulations to be part of the National Health Information System (NHIS), the engineering team adapted this platform to malaria data management through the following steps: installation of Ubuntu operating system and DHIS2 national instance in an MoH own server; self-training using on-line resources, including posts and questions; configuration and start-up of an own web domain; adaptation of case-management and Long-Lasting Insecticidal Nets (LLIN) modules; configuration of users management; design of users’ manuals; development of dashboards; and distribution of Personal Computers (PC) and tablets. In 2023, last quarter, the NMP team provided training sessions to DHIS2 users from malaria diagnosis and treatment (D&T) community and institutional posts in high-burden and recent re-introduction districts as part of an implementation pilot. This stage started in fifty capture points in five prioritized states. So far, this pilot has increased data quality and opportunity, including the possibility to disaggregate indicators in specific age groups, test results, and consumption of inputs in particular quantities. In 2024, NMP will incorporate new D&T posts and data entry points as users. MoH expects a scaling-up of the DHIS2 platform to cover countrywide malaria data management and to introduce HIV and TB, as well as other public health topics, in the next three years (2024-2026) through the Global Fund, PAHO, and other organizations support.
Primary Author: Dennis Quiñones
Keywords:
National Health Information System, DHIS2, multifunctional platform, free software, epidemiological surveillance, malaria, eHealth, mHealth, community health
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