A Brief Guide to iHRIS Plan

To ensure that the right health care provider is in the right place with the right skills, countries require current, accurate data on human resources for health (HRH). A strong human resources information system (HRIS) enables health care leaders to quickly answer the key policy and management questions affecting service delivery. The Capacity Project has developed the iHRIS Suite, an integrated suite of free, Open Source HRIS solutions, to supply health sector leaders with the information they need to assess HR problems, plan effective interventions and evaluate those interventions.

iHRIS Plan is the workforce planning and modeling component of the iHRIS Suite. This software improves how health sector planners and program decision-makers plan for their health workforce needs in developing country settings and make effective policy decisions to meet those needs.

Benefits of iHRIS Plan

iHRIS Plan uses data from iHRIS Qualify and iHRIS Manage—the other two components of the iHRIS suite—as well as other sources of HR data to form a complete picture of the health workforce in the country, which can be analyzed by cadre. The software projects how that workforce will change in the future based on known influences such as attrition due to retirement, illness and out-migration and the number of trained health workers annually entering the workforce. This projection is compared to the anticipated health workforce needs over the same period, calculated from a targeted health worker-to-population ratio set by cadre. The software visually displays the gap between actual workers and needed workers over time to help planners quickly assess how to meet health workforce needs. To aid with decision-making, the user can estimate the costs of training and staffing plans.

As a modeling tool, iHRIS Plan will:

  • Promote data-driven decision-making among workforce planners
  • Educate planners about the factors that affect human resources and workforce needs
  • Strengthen stakeholder commitment and collaboration in developing workforce strategies.

Using iHRIS Plan, workforce planners and decision-makers can understand what will happen if different actions are taken to influence the health workforce or if no action is taken. These projections help prioritize policy changes by demonstrating which changes have greater or lesser impact on the workforce. The projections also alert planners to potential problems in the health workforce supply.

The workforce planning model helps planners and policy makers answer the following types of questions:

  • In the absence of any policy change, what will my country's health workforce look like in ten years?
  • Based on current population projections, how many more nurses should I hire to meet the need?
  • If the mandatory retirement age is increased, what will be the corresponding increase of available staff over the next ten years?

iHRIS Plan Features

iHRIS Plan will provide an interface to a standard, internationally accepted model for workforce planning, developed by the World Health Organization. The initial version of the software (available now) enables users who are new to workforce planning to quickly generate projections based on a simplified planning model and a minimum of data. In later versions, experienced users who have additional data available can choose more complex modeling options that result in more robust plans.

The software produces graphical projections for each year in the modeled timeframe that can be disaggregated by cadre for presentation to stakeholders. These projections compare the actual number of health workers to the number required to meet the country's health care needs. In addition, users can produce tabular reports that project actual numbers as well as salary and training costs.

The following features are included in Version 1:

  • Define one or more pools of human resources by health worker cadre based on current data
  • Project workforce supply for any number of years by specifying the number of health workers in each defined cadre that are projected to leave or join the workforce each year
  • Project health workforce targets for each defined cadre based on population change
  • Generate graphical models showing the gaps between actual workforce changes and projected workforce needed over time
  • Aggregate or disaggregate models by health worker cadre
  • Enable and disable changes to a cadre and immediately display the effect of the changes on the model to test various interventions or policy changes on the workforce
  • Project costs of health worker staffing and training plans
  • Copy a projection for faster data entry
  • Group projections by user-defined categories.

The following features ensure security and accuracy of data stored in iHRIS Plan:

  • Data sources captured for verification
  • Password-protected logins to allow only authorized users to access the data
  • Role-based user accounts so that non-authorized user actions and datasets are hidden
  • Automated logging of the username, date and time when data are entered or changed
  • Permanent archiving of all data changes to ensure a consistent record.

We also released a Windows-based version of iHRIS Plan. This version is intended for use in areas that do not have a reliable Internet connection or where a single-user desktop version is needed.

Planned for future versions are data import and export, a wizard interface to guide new users through creating a projection, extensive on-screen help developed by workforce planning experts and more robust reports including a workforce plan template.

Related Systems

iHRIS Plan can import and analyze data from the Capacity Project's other iHRIS products:

  • iHRIS Manage, a human resources management system
  • iHRIS Qualify, a certification and licensing management system.

Working together, the three components of the iHRIS Suite provide a powerful feedback loop for analyzing, planning and managing health workforce resources and needs.

For more detailed information about our products and our work, visit www.capacityproject.org/hris. To learn about our implementation process, please see A Brief Guide to the iHRIS Software Suite. To learn about our other software products, see our other one-page guides: