Description of Session
The Ethiopian Ministry of Health (FMOH) has been using two independent, propriety HMIS systems, covering to different regions within the country. This parallel structure has posed challenge to integrate datasets from different regions, conduct national level analysis without manual data integration, and to implement improvements to the system functionality. Thus, FMOH has decided to transition to DHIS2 to address these challenges, and thus to improve their ability to use health data for decision making, through the introduction of a singular, open-source, government owned HMIS that will harmonize upstream data collection as well as downstream reporting and data use and analysis across all levels of the health sector. Facilitating the transition from the two legacy HMIS systems to a new, singular system, is not without its own challenges. Thus, it was critical to implement a transition strategy that brings minimal disruption to the current processes of data collection and use. The FMOH has accomplished customization of the software to the Ethiopian context and conducted user acceptability and field application tests and successfully achieved legacy data migration. In addition, FMOH has conducted a comprehensive 5-days training for over 7000 health professionals at all levels in the health system. The online and offline version of DHIS2 is deployed at >95% of health facilities. However, the reporting rate varies among regions. Currently, service reporting rate has reached 90% while the disease reporting rate is at 80%. This panel presentation will describe the transition processes to DHIS2 using the systems approach covering the business, data, application, and infrastructure aspects of the transition. Particular focus will be given to the challenges of implementation at scale, localization requirements unique to Ethiopia, the HealthNet infrastructure as enabler to DHIS2 operation, the shift in focus from reporting to visualization and data use, and the DHIS2 governance issues.
