This abstract has been accepted at the 2024 DHIS2 Annual Conference
Making software health workers love to use got us the data we need: Nigeria Hypertension case study
In 2020, Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Health (FMoH) made the decision to digitize hypertension and diabetes management. With support from HISP Nigeria, WHO and Resolve to Save Lives, FMOH adopted the DHIS2 configuration made using the WHO HEARTS indicators. In just three years, the digitized hypertension program expanded from 12 primary health care centers (PHCs) to 104 across Ogun and Kano states and manages over 27,000 patients. Interventions that usually took more than a quarter could now be implemented in real-time. And because Nigeria already had a DHIS2 instance for managing maternal health, HIV and other disease areas; technical challenges to adopt DHIS2 for Hypertension management were small. Consistent and efficient treatment through simple treatment protocols The Hypertension and Diabetes program collected the bare minimum data needed to drive key indicators. This allowed enrollment times to be reduced to around 4 minutes and follow-up time for existing patients to be reduced to around 1 minute. The DHIS2 package was also configured for search via QR codes so patients records could be quickly retrieved. Decentralization of access to BP checks A simple configuration meant it reduced the burden of training. Community health extension workers (CHEWs) around Nigeria were able to administer care per the protocol and update patient records. Daily updates to the DHIS2 dashboard made it possible to spot issues quickly and implement interventions to improve the program in real-time. For example, in Kano, the DHIS2 dashboard easily identified 1,767 patients overdue for care and streamlined outreach to bring 1,222 of those patients back in for their follow-up appointments. Reducing barriers to quality care With the DHIS2 platform, patient records are no longer tied to a single facility: a patient can visit any of the 100+ participating PHCs and health care workers are able to access their records and provide consistent care. The program’s main focus areas were: Accurately measuring only the data that needs to be tracked—the bare minimum of data to drive key indicators. Reducing time spent on data entry to less than 15% of a patient’s visit time. Improving patient retention by facilitating the process of following up with patients who have missed appointments. Reducing time needed for training Improving quality continuously i.e removing the tedious manual aggregation of paper-based systems. We hope that other countries can replicate Nigeria’s success by using the DHIS2 Hypertension metadata package.
Primary Author: Tony Joy
Keywords:
hypertension, diabetes, user experience
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