Description of Session
Since 2016, the Ethiopian Federal Ministry of Health has been working to digitize the existing family folder information system for Health Extension Workers (HEWs) in Ethiopia. The proposed Electronic Community Health Information System (eCHIS) was envisioned as both a job aid--designed to improve quality of care and support longitudinal client tracking and referrals-- and a data reporting and tool-- providing data to decision makers on community health status. Over three years of visioning, design, requirements gathering, software development, infrastructure strengthening, and deployment at scale, the FMOH has leveraged funding from multiple sources and drawn on the expertise of multiple partners to create to scale the eCHIS to more than 1200 users and eight programmatic areas. This panel will bring together representatives from the FMOH, JSI, Dimagi, and Simprints to discuss different facets of the eCHIS journey. The FMOH will describe the vision for the eCHIS, how the FMOH led a requirements gathering process, developed a governance process that allowed it to harness multiple funding streams and manage the inputs of multiple partners, and how FMOH software developers have worked to make this vision a reality. JSI will present information on the current state of the eCHIS, and provide an implementation perspective on the process of deploying the system to increasing scale in partnership with Regional Health Bureaus across four regions of Ethiopia. Dimagi will discuss the user centered design process for designing the service delivery modules of the eCHIS as well as learnings from the demonstration phases of the project. Newest partner, Simprints, will present on the integration of biometric identification with the eCHIS platform, including results from the first demonstrations of this new capability.
