Globally, health programs are increasingly replacing manual systems with open source Electronic Medical Record (EMR) Systems. EMRs can provide efficiencies in documentation and retrieval of clinical records for individual patient care. This in turn translates to faster and better quality of care. Ad...

Advancements in digital technology have provided ample opportunity for the health sector to share and use tools and other resources to build and sustain systems for high-quality health data. The creation and initial implementation of such resources is often an exciting time; however, challenges rema...

Imagine two big rooms within Kenya’s Ministry of Health (MOH) packed with cluttered paperwork. Over 50,000 health worker (HW) personnel files are stacked high – pure chaos for finding information about the health workforce and making it impossible to aggregate data and provide broad perspectives...

As in many resource constrained settings, the ratio of client populations to community health workers is large. Further inflating this ratio are issues of chronic absenteeism and inadequate staffing. A direct result of this overburdened health workforce is the limited time then available for quality...

Mortality and cause of death data are an important aspect of national health information. Countries need to know how many people die each year, in order to design effective public health policies (Mahapatra, 2007). In Kenya, the Civil Registration Services (CRS) registers vital statistics. Although ...

In 2016 USAID convened a co-creation workshop in Accra, Ghana that resulted into the Regional Action through Data (RAD) project. The project focused on coming up with innovative ways of using data to influence decision making at facility, national and regional levels. The two partner regional blocks...

The presentation during the panel discussion will showcase Tuneme.org. UNFPA through its flagship youth programme called “Safeguard Young People” (SYP) in collaboration with Praekelt Foundation, Ford Foundation and DFID developed and rolled out Tune Me, a mobile site (mobisite) designed for low-...

Performance-based Financing (PBF) has been implemented many developing countries to strengthen the health system and improve health service provision and quality. PBF provides financial incentives to health providers based on the delivery of specified priority outputs, upon verification that the res...

Individuals in sub-Saharan Africa often struggle to afford healthcare, let alone quality services, due to barriers including lack of investments in health facilities, inadequately trained staff as well as geographic disparities and transportation challenges; women face the disproportionate additiona...

The global digital health community extolls the importance of coordination and local ownership of digital health programs, especially during nation-wide digital transformation. However, many countries face entrenched and complex challenges in their health systems, especially when trying to establish...

Since 2003, Tula has worked in partnership with the Ministry of Health in Guatemala to implement a digital health network, which aims to improve the health of vulnerable populations by strengthening the delivery of primary health services in commonly under-served communities. Tula’s digital health...

How can you create a national health worker registry when competing databases already exist? One way is to create a shared national repository that draws a minimum data set from each database and shares back this larger, more comprehensive database back with the original systems. Sounds easy, eh? We...

Automation of supply chain systems (LMIS) and health management information (HMIS) has received a lot of attention and support in developing countries particularly over the past decade. However, pharmaceutical regulatory systems have generally speaking received far less attention. The business case ...

Improvements in phone access, particularly among women, is increasingly being highlighted for its transformative potential to accelerate social and economic development and potentially improve health outcomes. Yet a dearth of evidence exists linking technology directly to improvements in careseeking...

The ultimate goal of digital health information systems is provision of information to multiple users for decision making. Information is of little value if it is not available in formats that meet the needs of multiple users − policy-makers, planners, managers, health care providers, communities,...

Over the past few years, Dimagi has worked with the government of India to deploy a mobile application built on the CommCare platform to over 300,000 nutrition workers in rural and urban communities across the country. The nutrition workers active on the application span eight states in India and su...

This session describes the user-centered design process and development decisions for a mobile application for tuberculosis screening, tracking, referral, and reporting among private clinical facilities in Nigeria. Paper-based TB screening, referral and reporting in private clinics, laboratories, ph...

Responsible data practice has implications in the digital health landscape and is a topic on many development practitioners' minds. Protecting the privacy and security of patients and stakeholders through proper collection, use, and handling of digital data is a huge concern- especially when there a...

This session will explore a satellite enumeration and ground-truthing exercise that took place in a remote part of Ethiopia under the USAID President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI) VectorLink project. The goal of this activity was to find out how many eligible structures existed in a specific region o...

With the rapid emergence of Digital Immunization Registries (DIRs) across low-middle income countries for achieving better immunization outcomes, this session will focus on providing participants with our experience of developing, testing and scaling up the Zindagi Mehfooz (Safe Life; ZM) Digital Im...

The Kenyan health sector has numerous health information systems (HIS) innovations that lack orchestration towards integration and require robust structures and processes based on standards. To sustain gains made beyond the project life, a USAID funded project (Health Informatics Governance and Data...

Implemented by the National Primary Healthcare Development Agency, Nigeria’s PBF system utilizes a suite of tools to incentivize improved healthcare provision. This system depends on high quality data collected from facilities, verification of this data across different sources, and payments assoc...

• Through 8 years of developing and implementing community-based family planning systems with four NGO partners, D-tree International has established the solution Family Planning Plus, a comprehensive digital system supporting community-based family planning service provision, based on the Balance...

In recent years, the widespread digitisation of ID has been accompanied by large-scale breaches of privacy (in the Philippines, Nigeria, India, and more). Europe’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), the EU’s (in)famous answer to protecting the personal data of its citizens, has been bot...

Four years following the 2015 Ebola epidemic, innovative and collaborative local and regional initiatives have fostered notable improvements in health information systems (HIS) within the West Africa region. One initiative, WAHIT - the West African Health Informatics Team - started as a proof of con...

Digital health (DH) technologies widely referred to as ehealth technologies, present new or improved ways of delivering healthcare, conducting health promotion activities and monitoring public health. Its fast-changing landscape requires the health workforce to renew their digital skills. Currently,...

The use of open-ended questions can be a blessing or curse for mobile health platforms and the researchers who want to improve them. Qualitative data are rich, offering unexpected insights and perspectives that standard closed questions are likely to miss. But analysing open-ended questions, comment...

The Ebola outbreak in West Africa has brought the consequences of a possible pandemic to the forefront of public health concerns in Senegal. The country has embraced a “one health” approach to surveillance, and community-level data are a key element of this approach. We developed and tested a co...

In sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) blood lead levels in children under 6 are a public health hazard with levels much higher than US or European children. Research about children lead levels in SSA is scarce. One 2013 article published in the journal “Tropical Medicine & International Health” noted ther...

ZonaSegura is a trauma-informed youth-centered innovative research study and mobile solution to address teen dating violence in Honduras. Led by the YTH Initiative of ETR, in partnership with the Public Health Institute’s GOJoven International Program and GOJoven Honduras, this applied study and m...