Pape Gaye, IntraHealth’s President and CEO, recently participated in the Rockefeller Institute’s Bellagio Conference, Making the eHealth Connection. The conference brought thought leaders together to explore the use of public health informatics and national health information systems to improve health care in developing countries. Attendees included representatives from International NGOs, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, countries throughout the world, and the symposium organizer, the University of Washington’s Center for Public Health Informatics.
Conference participants agreed that a weak infrastructure continues to challenge health care advancement in poorer areas, but the use of extant technologies such as cell phones and targeted development of internet-based solutions hold considerable promise in improving people’s access to health care.
IntraHealth’s Human Resources Information System (HRIS) development raised considerable interest. Developed for the USAID-funded Capacity Project, the HRIS strengthening process includes a suite of low-cost Open Source software solutions designed to be adaptable to countries’ varying HRIS needs. Other emerging workshop themes included using technology in emergency areas and for decision support, as well as using it to gather and disseminate evidence in policy development and to support front-line providers.
Participants at the workshop identified five key areas for advancing public health through informatics:
Pape Gaye, president of IntraHealth International, and Dykki Settle, IntraHealth’s Director of Informatics, recently attended the PHI2008 Conference, hosted by the University of Washington in Seattle. The theme was “Envisioning Options for Integrated Public Health Information Systems for Low Resource Settings: Components, Connections, Partners, Strategies.”
The conference is led by Global Partners in Public Health Informatics, an alliance of governmental and non-governmental organizations, academic institutions, private sector contributors, and individuals that looks for ways to use communication and information technologies to address health challenges in resource-poor settings around the world. The 2008 conference included representatives of more than 50 organizations working in public health. Attendees represented 15 countries.
Pape’s presentation brought capacity building to the attention of the conference by highlighting the need to use eHealth systems to expand the reach of health workers. His talk was unique in its focus on capacity building, in that the talks of other presenters generally fit within any one of several issues including the interoperability of information systems, strategies for developing national health systems, or coordinating eHealth initiatives.
The presentation reviewed the challenges and opportunities associated with capacity building and ICT within the HRH field. He detailed the advantages of the Performance Improvement (PI) approach for its impact on health workers in low resource settings, and outlined a model of PI that can be adapted for capacity building in eHealth. Learning for Performance, IntraHealth’s HRIS work, and the HRH Global Resource Center were all highlighted during the talk.
Here are the main takeaways from his presentation:
The presentation also addressed the emergence of Generation Y, showing how eHealth initiatives represent an opportunity to expand the reach of people familiar with using technology and fluent with social networking. This part of the talk attracted particular interest from the audience in the Q and A that followed.
The blog talk-share-learn recently posted a roundup of international development projects that are using mobile phones to deliver information and services. This list highlights what a powerful tool the mobile phone is and how many ways it can be used in low-resource settings. Here are some of the applications used for health care:
Community health workers in Rwanda.
One of IntraHealth International’s projects, the Last Mile Initiative, is designing an Open Source application for data collection and reporting via cell phones and other mobile devices to create a telecommunications-enabled Community Health Services Information System for the health sector in Rwanda.
The automated system itself is designed to rely on a centralized voice-response unit. Community health workers will make phone calls to the central processor and will be prompted to provide service data on a set of pre-determined indicators. The data collected via the voice response system will then be written to the database. Managers will be able to call into the system to retrieve performance data indicating how well their communities are meeting targets or performing as compared to the district, regional and/or national averages. The automated system also will support the broadcasting of updates from district, regional or national authorities that will keep health workers abreast of recent policy changes and disease outbreaks.
This project is just now getting under way. Visit the IntraHealth Informatics blog for updates over the next few months.
What is happening with HRIS Strengthening? Get news about our ongoing work in the field, find out when new features and releases of the software are available, learn more about human resource information systems, and join the conversation. Your comments and questions are welcome.