VWC HIS Analysis 27-5-2009

Research Paper & Strategic Briefing
Health Information Systems in

Developing Countries
A Landscape Analysis
Page 0 • / Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009
May 2009
Contents
Contents ................................................................................................................................................................... 1
Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................................................ 3
Executive Summary ................................................................................................................................................ 5
Introduction .......................................................................................................................................................... 11
Research Methods ............................................................................................................................................ 12
Terminology ...................................................................................................................................................... 13
Landscape Overview ............................................................................................................................................ 15
Decentralization and the Importance of Health Information Systems.................................................... 15
Trends Shaping the Idea of a National Health Information System ........................................................ 15
Reconsidering the Definition of HIS ............................................................................................................ 18
Movement Toward a National HIS in Developing Countries .................................................................. 23
Cross-cutting ‘Second Generation’ Trends .................................................................................................. 28
Case Studies ........................................................................................................................................................... 31
India ................................................................................................................................................................... 33
Brazil .................................................................................................................................................................. 40
Zambia ............................................................................................................................................................... 47
Next Steps.............................................................................................................................................................. 58
Additional Recommendations ........................................................................................................................ 59
Country HIS Scans ............................................................................................................................................... 63
Bangladesh ........................................................................................................................................................ 63
Belize .................................................................................................................................................................. 65
China .................................................................................................................................................................. 67
Ethiopia ............................................................................................................................................................. 69
Ghana................................................................................................................................................................. 71
Haiti .................................................................................................................................................................... 73
Indonesia ........................................................................................................................................................... 75
Kenya ................................................................................................................................................................. 77
Mexico ............................................................................................................................................................... 79
Mozambique ..................................................................................................................................................... 81
Peru .................................................................................................................................................................... 83
Rwanda .............................................................................................................................................................. 85
Sierra Leone ...................................................................................................................................................... 87
South Africa ...................................................................................................................................................... 89
Page 1 • Contents Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009

Uganda ............................................................................................................................................................... 91
Vietnam ............................................................................................................................................................. 93
Appendix A: Value Chain Analysis .................................................................................................................. 95
Appendix B: HIS 2.0 ........................................................................................................................................ 101
End Notes............................................................................................................................................................ 106
Bibliography ........................................................................................................................................................ 115
Page 2 • Acknowledgements Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009

Acknowledgements
Vital Wave Consulting is thankful to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which sponsored this
important study and to the numerous individuals and organizations who have shared their ideas and
experiences to inform this report and to contribute to the advancement of the Health Information
Systems field. In particular, we would like to thank:
Dr. Christoph Bunge, Dr. Bob Pond, Dr. Hamtabu Addo, Dr. Nosa Orobaton and Dr. Sally
Stansfield, of the Health Metric Network, World Health Organization; David Lubinski; Dr.
Andy Kanter of Millennium Village Project, Earth Institute; Dr. K Ganapathy of the Apollo
Telemedicine Networking Foundation, India; Yusuph Kulindwa of the University of Dar Es
Salaam; Dr. Rafael Lozano and Dr. Walter Curioso of the University of Washington; Paul Meyer
of Voxiva; Eric Blantz of Inveneo; Tristan Rutter of AccessTec; Gerry Douglas of Baobab
Health Partnership; Dr. Neal Lesh, Jon Jackson, Cory Zue of Dimagi; Gordon Cressman of
RTI; Paul Biondich of Regenstrief; Holly Ladd of AED SATELLIFE; Ivo Njosa of World Bank;
Stephen Settimi of USAID; Mark Landry of PEPFAR; and Dr. Eric Bigirimana, General
Practitioner and Former Provincial Medical Director, Bururi, Burundi.
We are also appreciative of the support of the individuals and organizations that shared their
experiences with us in the case studies. Thank you to the following individuals:
In India
Manish Kumar of IntraHealth; Siddhartha Shankar of Drishtee; Dr. Rattan Chand, Dr.
Tarun Seem and Gajinder PS Seerah, all of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare,
India; Pravin Srivastava of ISS, India; Anand Sahu of National Rural Health Mission,
India; and Rajesh Choudhary.
In Zambia
Dr. Mark Shields, Chief of Epidemiology and Strategic Information, US Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention and Director of SmartCare Electronic Health Records
Project, Derrick Muneene, SmartCare Project Manager, and the SmartCare teams in
Zambia and Ethiopia; Dr. Perry Killam, Director of the Zambia Electronic Perinatal
Record System (ZEPRS), Harmony Chi, ZEPRS Program Manager, and Marcus Achiume,
Chief Information Officer, all of the Centre for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia
(CIDRZ); and Chris Simoonga, Deputy Director of Monitoring, Evaluation, and Research,
and Noel Masese, Head of Information and Communications in the Ministry of Health and
the entire Ministry of Health SmartCare team.
In Brazil
Dr. Beatriz de Faria Leao and Dr. Lincoln Moura of Zilics, Brazil; Dr. Claudio Giulliano da
Costa, Cláudia de Fátima Miranda, Heloisa Corral, Dr. Deborah Pimenta, all of São Paulo
City Department of Health; Moacyr Perche and Dr. Ligia Neaime de Almeida of Campinas

Department of Health; Dr. Efigênia Cardoso and Nacles Bernardino of Camacari
Department of Health.

Executive Summary
The regions, nations, and communities that comprise the developing world face a wide variety of
health-related challenges, and the health systems that address those challenges are struggling with
limited resources and capability. Health leaders must therefore focus on maximizing the value of scarce
resources and finding ways to make health systems operate as efficiently as possible. Having reliable
data on the performance of different parts of the health system is the only way to devise, execute, and
measure health interventions. Successful strengthening of health systems will require relevant, timely,
and accurate information on the performance of the health system itself. The goal of a health
information system (HIS) is to provide that information.
This document considers several aspects of health information systems for developing countries. First,
it looks at the threats to health and the challenges facing health care systems in the developing world.
Next, it surveys the landscape of efforts to specify and create successful HIS at the national level. Then
it examines three case studies in depth and finally reviews the important challenges and opportunities
associated with creating an effective HIS.
Research methods
The Vital Wave Consulting team employed three principal research techniques to create a
comprehensive overview of the HIS landscape. Initially, the team conducted an extensive analysis of
secondary literature on health information and interviews with experts in Health Information Systems.
Next, the research team conducted a thorough review of secondary sources for 19 countries, including
literature reviews and interviews to capture a basic picture of HIS initiatives in each country. Finally,
primary research was undertaken in three countries with notable HIS initiatives: Brazil, India and
Zambia. Site visits to these countries provided first-hand information on three initiatives of special
significance. Though it is an upper-middle income country, Brazil is nonetheless included in this report
because it exemplifies certain important characteristics of more advanced HIS development occurring
in a developing country and can be a reference point for countries in Africa and Asia
Health Care Trends shaping national health information systems today
There has been substantial activity and innovation in the implementation of HIS in the last three
decades, encompassing both successes and failures. Since the requirements of a successful HIS depend
on the health system it serves, it is worth looking at the trends shaping health care in the developing
world. These trends will impose increasing demands on health care systems and will potentially impact
health information systems by presenting new data sources and opportunities for policy formulation.
• The role of private-sector health care will continue to increase in the developing world,
requiring health information systems that are informed by private practitioners, facilities, and
insurers.
• Economic development will change the profile of disease challenges, in which chronic
conditions increase in importance even while infectious diseases remain a threat. This will
dictate the need for additional health indicators and these indicators will need to be
incorporated into HIS. Pandemic risks will link developed and developing countries,
necessitating disease surveillance systems that accurately track outbreaks and transmit this
Page 5 • Executive Summary Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009

information internationally. This data may allow HIS to not only report on “current” health
status, but also potential threats and vulnerabilities in the health care system.
• Globalization will continue to drain skilled medical and IT talent away from health systems
serving the poor, necessitating health information systems that enable community-based health
care workers to perform more advanced point of care services and which are sustainable in
extremely low resource environments.
• Urbanization will draw talent and resources away from rural environments where a
disproportionate number of the poor still live. Currently, most HIS only incorporate data
collected at facilities, which leaves the needs of the rural poor, who often cannot get to a
facility, under-represented in current HIS. The data collected by community-based health care
workers operating in rural settings, if communicated to an HIS, will allow rural health needs to
be more clearly understood.
‘First generation’ HIS
Though there is considerable diversity in HIS throughout the developing world, these systems typically
share several key common traits:
• They function in the public sector and often only

capture data from interactions with the public health
‘First generation’ HIS have
system. demonstrated significant impact
• There is significant fragmentation and duplication in in improving patient health
data collection, because governments, donors and outcomes and increasing the
implementing partners have little incentive to efficiency of health systems.
Improvements have been
collaborate on data collection, data sharing, or documented in:
leveraging common infrastructure.
• The health information system is not used by those • Increased follow-up rates on
providing or managing health services at the local anti-retroviral drug campaigns
level, as these individuals are often presumed to not • Sharp reduction in emergency
need health information of this nature. evacuation times and costs
• Data collection is a significant burden on those
• Dramatic shortening in TB
collecting the data and detracts from time spent diagnose time
delivering services.
• Various independent systems are seldom integrated, • Improved clinical efficiency
and laboratory revenues
which impedes the ability to share data, increase the
efficiency of operations or enhance the Note: Citations for these studies are
sophistication of analysis and decision making. in main text of the report
Organizations such as the Health Metrics Network have

developed frameworks for what a successful HIS might look like, in which data from many sources is
drawn into a central data warehouse, where thorough analysis takes place and actions are taken on the
basis of that analysis. This framework fills several key gaps, but does not currently address:

• The problem of data quality and so long as the burdens and incentives surrounding data
collection are not addressed, data quality will remain poor.
• The impact of health activity in the private sector as a source of data.
• Important data sources such as stand-alone disease surveillance systems, logistics management
systems and emergency response systems.
Movement toward a ‘second generation’ HIS in developing countries
An analysis of the health information landscape suggests that countries are moving from the established
paper-based implementations of district health information to the “second generation” HIS, where
health encounter data is used to not only inform policy but to improve care at the point of service. The
table below provides a categorization of health information systems today in five stages, as countries
move toward systems of greater scope, scale, and sophistication. The categorization captures in a
general way the characteristic features of national-level programs to collect health information. HIS
stages are based on five dimensions: data flow and collection, data utilization and integration, resources
and capacity, scope, and scale. The categorization depicts the evolving sophistication of these systems,
the quality of decision making that these systems can support, and the capabilities required to sustain
them.
Stage 1 Stage 2 Stage 3 Stage 4 Stage 5

Bangladesh
Haiti
Kenya
Mozambique
Peru
Vietnam
Ghana
India
Indonesia
Mexico
Rwanda
EthiopiaEthiopia
Zambia
China
Sierra Leone
South Africa
Uganda
Low Income
Lower Middle Income Sao Paulo
Upper Middle Income Belize
Stage 1 is characterized by the usage of conventional paper-based systems for collecting district health
indicators. The second Stage is characterized by as optimization of paper systems through simplifying
indicators and reducing duplication. The third Stage is identified by a migration of traditional district
health information systems to electronic storage and reporting. The fourth stage is characterized by the

introduction of operational IT systems as a source of data for HIS. The fifth Stage represents the
achievement of an end state of a fully comprehensive and integrated national HIS.
It is important to note, however, that progress among these stages implies not just improvements in
technology, but also a commitment to the use of health system information in evidence-based
management decision making. This in turn requires effective leadership and comprehensive training at
all levels of the health system.
Several important trends are evident among “second generation” HIS in which health encounter data is
used to not only inform policy but to improve care at the point of service. These trends include:
• Better information management tools at the local level.

• Data capture through routine business operations.
• Identification of the minimum essential data sets.
• Growth of specialized technology and providers.
• Mobile devices become a key enabler for HIS.
• Early experience yields enthusiasm and skepticism around HIS.
Case studies illustrate different approaches for different goals
Country HIS case studies were organized around three main factors: Income Level, Scale and Scope.
Scale refers to the size of the population covered by the HIS implementation while scope refers to the
amount of data and services incorporated into the HIS.
Three countries – India , Brazil , and Zambia – were chosen for site visits to collect in-depth
information about major initiatives that represented distinct sets of goals and challenges at different
levels of income, scale and scope.
The table below outlines the differences between the case study countries.
Case Study Region Income Level Scale Scope
National, Core health and

India Asia Lower middle
rural focus disease indicators
Brazil Citywide, Resource allocation,

Latin America Upper middle
(Sao Paulo) urban EMR-based
Sub-Saharan National,
Zambia Low EMR-based
Africa urban and rural
As demonstrated in the three tables below, Brazil, India, and Zambia each approach HIS in a distinct
fashion.
In India , a nationwide initiative of the National Rural Health Mission to introduce a Health
Management Information System (HMIS) has been developed with the aim of improving the quality of
health data in India and understanding the effectiveness and impact of recently-launched programs. The
HMIS deployment is taking place on a massive scale, involving thousands of health facilities and

hundreds of thousands of health workers, and its success or failure will likely have a far-reaching impact
on HIS development in India for years to come.
Brazil, though an upper-middle-income country, represents some of the greatest income disparity in
the developing world, with about 31% of the population earning under $1 1 per day. The HIS studied,
called SIGA Saúde, is a large-scale, advanced HIS explicitly designed to manage resources in a public
health system serving a very large population of urban poor. With many features of an Enterprise
Resource Management system, SIGA Saúde offered the chance to understand the potential of a
complex, operational system that generates indicator data from routine business operations, while at the
same time using system data to improve specific aspects of health-system performance.
Zambia was selected because it houses three significant health information management efforts: the
European Union-supported HMIS project, SmartCare, and ZEPRS. SmartCare was of particular
interest because it represented a significant, nationwide initiative to improve patient health outcomes by
providing frontline health care providers with relevant, timely patient information, which is housed in
electronic medical records. Furthermore, this effort was taking place alongside and national efforts to
reform the basic health information system, offering an opportunity to understand the challenges faced
by countries coping with multiple HIS initiatives.
Sao Paulo, Brazil India Zambia
Featured HIS Initiative: Featured HIS Initiative: Featured HIS Initiative:

SIGA Saúde Health Management SmartCare Electronic Health
Information System for the Record System
Sponsors/Partners: Sao National Rural Health Mission
Paulo City Department of (NRHM) Sponsors/Partners:
Health Ministry of Health of Zambia,
Sponsors/Partners: NRHM, US President’s Emergency
Key System Attributes: National Informatics Centre, Plan for AIDS Relief
Enterprise Resource Planning- National Health Systems (PEPFAR), US Centers for
like system with electronic Resource Centre, state Disease Control and
medical records to manage governments Prevention (CDC)
resource allocation and
patient flow Key System Attributes: Key System Attributes:
Web-based system that Distributed database system
Scale: Regional, managing collects health indicators for providing a portable patient
20 million health encounters monitoring and evaluation of health record to each patient
per year at 702 health NRHM programs
facilities Scale: 400 health facilities,
Scale: Initial focus on 18 with 250,000 patients
Scope: Comprehensive poor, rural states followed by registered
resource management and nationwide deployment
recording essential health Scope: Health records for
encounter data Scope: Reproductive and ante-natal care and HIV
child health and infectious treatment modules, with
diseases, in line with family planning, outpatient,
Millennium Development lab, pharmacy and under age
Goals (MDGs) 4, 5, and 6 5 modules added in 2009

Looking forward
The report concludes with a set of next steps and recommendations for governments and organizations
to follow to support effective health information management in the developing world. Although the
field of health informatics is relatively new in the developing world and it is still experimenting with
implementation models that can produce results, HIS remain critical to strengthening health systems in
developing countries. Good information on the performance of the health system and the
effectiveness of specific interventions is required to put extremely scarce resources to the best use.
There are significant risks inherent in large-scale IT investments in HIS for developing countries
because of the nascent state of local capability in these countries. It is important, therefore, to focus on
strategies and initiatives that can establish solid foundations upon which to build increasingly
sophisticated HIS over time. Accordingly, while not ignoring the crucial role of information
technology, these conclusions emphasizes steps that will improve the quality and consistency of data
reported by existing HIS without presupposing an advance commitment to high-risk IT investments.
Next Steps:
• Drive consensus adoption of a minimum set of essential indicators

• Determine the common, essential information needs across countries
Additional Recommendations:
• Enhance HIS success rates by supporting initiatives that have high-level

sponsorship and occur in the context of wider health-system reform
• Support in setting clear priorities for reform
• Define HIS needs and goals
• Streamline data collection
• Develop HIS to support user decision-making
• Plan for project operations and maintenance at project outset
• Invest in adapted technology
• Develop commercial markets
• Increase project accountability by changing the structure of provider contracts
• Invest in increasing the attractiveness of the HIS technology and services market

Introduction
The regions, nations, and communities that comprise the developing world face a wide variety of
health-related challenges. The afflictions of water-borne illness and nutritional deficiency affect low-
income communities all over the world. Vaccine-preventable diseases needlessly claim millions of lives
each year, as do infectious diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS. Thus, the challenge
of improving health outcomes in developing countries will remain, even as incomes and living
standards slowly improve.
Not only are the health challenges facing developing countries great, the health systems that address
those challenges are struggling with limited resources and capability. The need to find ways to
strengthen health systems overall is therefore urgent. Whereas stronger health systems may come as a
result of bolstering resources, and additional resources may be necessary, there will never truly be
adequate resources. Under that premise, there must be a focus on maximizing the value of very scarce
resources and finding ways to make health systems operate as efficiently as possible. Having reliable
data on the performance of the health system and its constituent parts is the only way to devise,
execute, and measure interventions. Successful strengthening of health systems will therefore require
relevant, timely, and accurate information on the performance of the health system itself. The goal of a
health information system is to provide that information.
The concept of an HIS can often be confusing because the term is sometimes applied to specialized
systems (for example, a disease surveillance system for tuberculosis or a patient registration system for a
hospital). In addition, the term applies to nationwide data collection efforts, that report on population
health status such as the conventional health district reporting, which is common in developing
countries. This paper focuses upon efforts to create national health information systems that integrate a
broad range of critical health-related data, ultimately covering an entire national population and that
can be used at all levels of the health system to support
improved service delivery and health outcomes.
A multi-faceted research approach
As understood here, a HIS is not primarily about was used to create this report,
starting with a comprehensive
technology. Whereas technology can enhance the review of secondary literature on
efficiency and effectiveness of information systems, HIS and health-related IT
collection and use of reliable data does not necessarily initiatives in developing countries,
require sophisticated technology. Even simple, paper- followed by extensive interviews
based systems can be effective if well conceived. In sum, it with experts in the health
informatics field and rounded out
is important to recognize the role that technology can play, with in-country research – in
while keeping in mind that the performance of an three extremely diverse
information system and the quality of decisions it supports developing countries: India,
are seldom a matter of technology alone. Brazil and Zambia.
This document considers several aspects of health

information systems for developing countries. First, it looks at the threats to health and the challenges
facing health care systems in the developing world. Next, it surveys the landscape of efforts to specify
and create successful HIS at the national level. Then it examines three case studies in depth and finally
reviews the important challenges and opportunities associated with creating an effective HIS.
Page 11 • Introduction Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009

Research Methods
To create a comprehensive scan of the HIS landscape, three principal research techniques were
employed. Initially, the Vital Wave Consulting team conducted an extensive analysis of secondary
literature on health information and interviews with experts in health information systems. The experts
interviewed were system vendors and implementers, in-country information technology (IT) officials,
and academic subject-matter experts. Next, the research team conducted an extensive review of
secondary sources for 19 countries, including literature reviews and interviews to capture a basic picture
of HIS initiatives in each country. Finally, primary research was undertaken in three of these countries
through country site visits, which provided first-hand information on three initiatives of special
significance.
Secondary research countries
Countries included in secondary research were chosen to represent a cross-section of low-income

countries that are distributed across major geographies and that have a variety of demographic profiles.
Also included were several large, emerging, lower and upper middle-income countries with large
populations of very poor citizens who are dependent upon public health systems. The following
geographies and countries were studied:
1. Asia , including Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam;

2. Sub-Saharan Africa , including Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Rwanda, Sierra Leone,
South Africa, Uganda, and Zambia; and
3. Latin America and the Caribbean , including Belize, Brazil, Haiti, Mexico, and Peru.
Primary research countries
Three countries – India , Brazil , and Zambia – were chosen for site visits to collect in-depth
information about three major initiatives that represented distinct sets of goals and challenges. Each
case study offered a chance to understand major issues at different stages of HIS development and, as
demonstrated in the table below, is unique in its geographic placement and income level.
Case Study Region Income Level Scale Scope
National, Core health and

India Asia Lower middle
rural focus disease indicators
Brazil Citywide, Resource allocation,

Latin America Upper middle
(Sao Paulo) urban EMR-based
Sub-Saharan National,
Zambia Low EMR-based
Africa urban and rural
In India , a nationwide initiative of the National Rural Health Mission to introduce a Health
Management Information System (HMIS) has been developed with the aim of improving the quality of
health data in India and understanding the effectiveness and impact of recently-launched programs. The
HMIS deployment is taking place on a massive scale, involving thousands of health facilities and

hundreds of thousands of health workers, and its success or failure will likely have a far-reaching impact
on HIS development in India for years to come.
Brazil, though an upper-middle-income country, represents some of the greatest income disparity in
the developing world, with about 31% of the population earning under $1 per day. The HIS studied,
called SIGA Saúde, is a large-scale, advanced HIS explicitly designed to manage resources in a public
health system serving a very large population of urban poor. With many features of an Enterprise
Resource Management system, SIGA Saúde offered the chance to understand the potential of a
complex, operational system that generates indicator data from routine business operations, while at the
same time using system data to improve specific aspects of health-system performance.
Zambia was selected because it houses three significant health information management efforts: the
European Union-supported HMIS project, SmartCare, and ZEPRS. SmartCare was of particular
interest because it represented a significant, nationwide initiative to improve patient health outcomes by
providing frontline health care providers with relevant, timely patient information, which is housed in
electronic medical records. Furthermore, this effort was taking place alongside national efforts to
reform the basic health information system, offering an opportunity to understand the challenges faced
by countries coping with multiple HIS initiatives.
Terminology
Discussions of health informatics, or health information systems, are often enhanced by a common
understanding of terminology. In the interest of clarity, this document adheres to the following
definitions.
Architecture , also referred to as enterprise architecture , refers to the organizing logic for
business processes, data, applications and IT infrastructure reflecting the integration and
standardization requirements of the health system’s operating model.
Data architecture describes the data structures used by an organization and/or its
applications. There are descriptions of data in storage and data in motion; descriptions of
data stores, data groups, and data items; and mappings of those data artifacts to data
qualities, applications, and locations, for example. Essential to realizing the target state, data
architecture describes how data is processed, stored, and utilized in a given system. It
provides criteria for data processing operations that make it possible to design data flows
and also control the flow of data in the system.
Data warehouse is a repository of an organization’s electronically stored data. In addition

to data storage, the means to retrieve and analyze data, to extract, transform and load data,
and to manage the data dictionary are essential components of a data warehousing system.
Operational systems contrast from data warehouses in that operational systems perform
day-to-day transaction processing.
A developing country has a Gross National Income per capita of less than or equal to
$11,455 according to World Bank’s country classification scheme. The World Bank

categorizes countries according to Gross National Income per capita (2007). Developing
countries are broken down into the following categories:
• Low income country : a low income country’s GNI per capita is $935 or less.
• Lower-middle income country : a lower-middle income country’s GNI per capita
is between $936 and $3,705.
• Upper-middle income country : an upper-middle income country’s GNI per
capita is between $3,706 and $11,455.
A health information system (HIS) refers to any organized effort to systematically

collect, maintain and disseminate data relevant to the performance of a health system or
any of its component parts. As such, any health system has potentially many health
applications functioning within it.
A health system is the complete universe of all activities that serve to maintain or improve
the health and longevity of a population in a specific geography.
Indicators are aggregate or compiled statistics derived from data pertaining to interactions,
events, or occurrences in the health system.
Health care delivery , or care delivery organization (CDO) refers to the core medical
system and its adjuncts, such as pharmacies, clinical laboratories, and their respective
supply chains.
Metadata is definitional data that provides information about or documentation of other

data managed within an application or environment. Metadata may include descriptive
information about the context, quality and condition, or characteristics of the data it
describes.
Microdata refers to data relating to an individual which is not, however, uniquely

identified to a particular person. The record of a clinic visit that does not otherwise identify
the patient is an example of microdata.
Personal health records (PHR) are transaction-level data on health-related events and
indicators pertaining to a single, identifiable individual. PHR includes − and is often used
interchangeably with − electronic medical records, patient health records, and other similar
terms.
A population is any universe of things, events, or occurrences on which data are collected.
Note on currency : Unless otherwise specified, all data and findings in this report are presented
in real US dollars.

Landscape Overview
Decentralization and the Importance of Health Information

Systems
With its declaration that “primary health care is essential health care” and its call for “urgent and
effective national and international action to develop and implement primary health care throughout
the world and particularly in developing countries,”2 the Alma-Ata conference in 1978 set a course
leading to the development of the health information systems most commonly seen in developing
countries today. The focus on primary care encouraged decentralization and the creation of health
districts administering publicly-funded health services within a geographic area of moderate size.
Concern for monitoring the performance of the health care system gave rise to paper-based data
collection systems intended to provide comprehensive data on the performance of the country’s public
health system and its disease burden.
In the past decade, there has been tremendous activity and innovation in the development of health
information systems, spurred in large part by technological advances, and the interest these advances
have generated in the health sector. Progress has been made in designing systems that meet the needs
of patients and health workers. IT implementations have demonstrated initial successes in improving
patient outcomes, particularly around HIV patient case management, and have increased the efficiency
of health services delivery as well, by improving the speed of laboratory testing, the evacuation of
patients in emergency settings, or the expected cost of tuberculosis treatment. Yet significant
shortcomings remain.
This section will offer a closer look at the promise and challenges of health information systems. It will
provide an overview of today’s health information landscape and describe the health information trends
that are shaping health systems. This section will also provide a view of emerging patterns in the way
that health information is evolving in the developing world.
Trends Shaping the Idea of a National Health Information

System
Any effort to create a health information system of national scale will necessarily involve a significant
commitment of time and resources, and is accompanied by inevitable risks. So it is worth pausing to
consider just what is meant by HIS in this context, the purposes it must serve, and the conditions under
which it must operate. These considerations suggest that a single national health information system is
difficult to create.
The Health Metrics Network (HMN),3 hosted by the World Health Organization, was organized to
spearhead an international effort to strengthen HIS in developing countries.
Page 15 • Landscape Overview Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009

HMN has developed a set of tools for the
Phase 1
Phase 2 comprehensive assessment of a country’s HIS,
Stakeholders,
Vision,
Priorities,
resulting in a multi-faceted picture of the
Assessment,
Gap Analysis
Strategic Plan strengths and weaknesses of all critical
Budget
elements, including data sources and
collection, as well as capacity for analysis and
use of information for policy making and
Funding administration. It was planned that
participating countries would follow the
process illustrated in Figure 1.
Phase 3
In the words of HMN, the goal of a national
HIS Strengthening &
Implementation
Phase 4
Data Sources health information system is to allow decision
Evaluate & Improve
Common Data Model makers to “identify problems and needs, track
Information Architecture
progress, evaluate the impact of interventions
Analytical Services
and make evidence-based decisions on health
policy, programme design and resource
Figure 1 - HMN Process
allocation.”4 This goal is ambitious, as the
potential users of health information include
“those delivering care and those responsible
for managing and planning health programs both within countries (health and finance ministries) and
outside (donors, development banks and technical support agencies).”5 The scope of the goals involved
and the size and diversity of the intended audience suggest that an effective national HIS therefore
entails:
 The collection of a very wide range of data from multiple sources and jurisdictions
 A data repository that is available to a diverse audience of users
 Functionality and business logic to perform the needed synthesis and analysis to turn raw data
into meaningful information usable for management and policy decision-making.
This is to be accomplished in the context of health systems that, beyond widespread poverty and weak
public institutions, are shaped by larger trends in disease, technology, and social development. These
trends will reshape health concerns and present new opportunities for addressing long-standing
challenges, but will also demand more from national HIS.
 The role of private-sector health care will continue to increase in the developing world.
Longitudinal data on health expenditure in developing countries is scarce, but does suggest that
private sector health expenditure is increasing as a share of total health expenditure.6 The
omission of private health data from HIS, therefore, will become more significant as private
sector participation in the health sector increases. Public health systems will need to be
structured to be able to engage with their private sector counterparts,7 and information
technology can play an important role in facilitating this process.
Second, in countries where private health expenditure represents a large share of income in
poor households, HIS that cover only public health services may under-report information on
these households. There may be a specific role for insurers, public or private, to play an

important part in shaping HIS as they form an important link within the private health care
system, and they have a strong vested interest in obtaining accurate data on health system
performance to support actuarial calculations underpinning the finances of all insurance.
Moreover, because they reimburse private providers, these insurers, public or private, are
uniquely positioned to require data on services rendered as a condition of payment. In Ghana
there is a World Bank project to create a nationwide integrated ICT solution for the National
Health Insurance Scheme to enhance financial management and resource utilization. Unlike the
typical district health information system, when complete this system will collect data from both
public and private sector facilities.8 The intersection of the health system and insurance systems
that fund it will be an essential nexus that drives data collection from the private sector.
 Economic development will change the profile of disease challenges. With a few notable
exceptions, the relationship between development and disease is typically positioned as a two-
way street: disease inhibits development, and poverty creates conditions that make people more
vulnerable to disease. As populations grow wealthier, their disease profile changes. Today,
major communicable diseases such as malaria, TB, HIV, cholera, and diarrheal diseases are a
main focus of attention in developing countries. Progress against these diseases will surely boost
economic development, but that improvement will eventually be accompanied by increased
incidence of chronic diseases, such as India is experiencing today in urban areas. 9, 10 This shift
in focus toward longitudinal health management will change the demands on primary care in
the health system and create demand for systems of effective monitoring and continuous care
of individual patients over extended periods of time. This too will change the way that HIS
must function, requiring flexibility in design in order to accommodate the appearance of new
disease threats, while still addressing infectious diseases.
 Pandemic risks will link developed and developing countries. In late 2002 and early 2003
much of the world was startled to discover that a new viral disease, Severe Acute Respiratory
Syndrome (SARS), had infected more than 8000 people in several months and rapidly spread
across wide areas of the globe. Globalization has increased the ease and speed with which
serious communicable diseases can become pandemic, and detecting and managing people with
diseases like SARS, avian flu or Extremely Drug Resistant TB (XDR-TB) becomes a global, not
a local, concern. Developing countries are committed to strengthening their surveillance
systems in conformance with the WHO Global Health Regulations. In response to SARS,
China developed its web-based real-time disease surveillance system and other countries such as
Mexico and Peru have similar disease surveillance systems. The urgency of effective surveillance
and incident response will compel the development and collection of indicators for surveillance
systems.
 Developments in medical technology enhance treatment but require improved

infrastructure for distribution. Powerful new drugs and vaccines will offer the prospect of
cure for many common diseases, but these products will require much better supply chains to
avoid very expensive losses due to spoilage or expiration. Vaccines and drugs that require cold-
chain storage and delivery can pose special problems in the developing world, where
transportation infrastructures are often inadequate and shortages of equipment such as syringes
are common. Future treatments will increasingly involve combinatorial drug cocktails that
require sophisticated administration and monitoring over lengthy periods of time. In many
cases, such as with HIV, improperly administering treatments can lead to very undesirable

results (increased drug resistance, dangerous side effects, wasted doses of expensive
medications, etc.). Monitoring the performance of the supply chain will be increasingly essential
to the success of disease programs. HIS will need reliable indicators on the basis of which to
correct bottlenecks and misallocation. Because of the difficulty of keeping manual inventories
especially in large facilities, operational software systems that handle real-time data will become
more and more necessary.
 Globalization will continue to drain skilled talent away from health systems serving the
poor. Doctors and nurses in developing countries are not just drawn to cities, but are
increasingly attracted to Europe or North America, where positions in medicine as well as
average non-medical wages are significantly higher than in the developing world. Analysis of
physicians in the US, the UK, Canada and Australia shows that 23-28% of physicians in those
countries are international medical graduates, and 40-75% of international physicians come
from low income countries. 11 As the author suggests, the analysis likely understates the
magnitude of the “brain drain” because not all physicians immigrating to the countries studied
succeed in obtaining their medical qualification, and not all physicians emigrating from low
income countries go to the four countries above. The
medical “brain drain” will drive investment in
technologies that enable non-physician health care Several trends will reshape health
workers such as nurses, midwives, community health concerns and present new
care workers, etc. to perform more advanced opportunities for addressing long
standing challenges, but will also
functions. It may encourage the implementation of demand more from national HIS.
HIS or related systems and infrastructure further down These include:
the health system hierarchy to reach these lower-level
health workers and enable them to compile and • The role of private-sector
transfer data. It will also reinforce the demand for HIS health care will continue to
increase in the developing
systems that are simpler and more intuitive to use and world.
learn, because the less time it takes to train someone to
use and become proficient with the HIS, the sooner • Economic development will
they become productive. Mobile devices will play an change the profile of disease
challenges.
important role in this process. A similar “brain drain”
pattern exists for IT personnel in the developing world • Pandemic risks will link
that likely affects the availability of IT resources for developed and developing
HIS projects. Initiatives that increase private sector countries.
participation and wages in health informatics in the • Developments in medical
developing world have the opportunity to slow this technology enhance treatment
trend, in much the same way that the growth of but require improved
business models such as business process outsourcing infrastructure for distribution.
(BPO) and call centers has enabled IT professionals in • Globalization will continue to
developing countries to gain world-class experience on drain skilled talent away from
challenging projects without leaving home. health systems serving the
poor.
Reconsidering the Definition of HIS

The trends discussed above, as well as the environments in which specific HIS have evolved, have
given way to health information systems different from theoretical descriptions of HIS. This sub-
section will describe this “first generation” health information system, or today’s health information

system, drawing from field research, expert interviews, and review of health informatics literature. It
will describe the impact and common challenges associated with “first generation” systems, laying the
groundwork for the “second generation” system described in the next sub-section.
Characterization of first generation HIS
First generation HIS share a set of common characteristics, readily observable in the HIS assessments
supported by the Health Metrics Network. First generation HIS are typically anchored within public
health systems. In the years following Alma Ata, a general pattern of data collection has evolved in such
systems. Activities at health facilities are recorded in written log books or registers. At regular intervals
these are tallied by health workers and summary reports of compiled indicators are forwarded to the
next higher administrative level of the system where they are recompiled and passed on again, repeating
the process until, in theory, a final country-wide compilation is available for use in setting policy.
The data in such systems

flows upward to the central
Ministry of Health (MoH) and
donors, but typically not
downwards (or horizontally)
to the health care provider.
Many “first generation” HIS
have been built by a single
agency, group, or program,
always with their specific
needs in mind. As such, many
systems may proliferate within
a single country, and the
systems tend to be siloed from
one another. They often
reflect the information needs
of a specific donor or program Picture 1: The dozen-plus registries that nurse midwives in India maintain
rather than those of the users
themselves. They also are generally designed to address a particular disease or condition, and are therefore
limited in scope. First generation HIS are frequently smaller in scale, as well.
Observed shortcomings of first generation HIS
These systems have a number of common traits:
• They function in the public sector and often only capture data from interactions with the
public health system or with specific surveillance and monitoring programs operated by donors
in conjunction with the public health system. However, this is beginning to change, as
evidenced by HIS coverage of private clinics in Zambia and private providers’ integration into
the Sao Paulo HIS scheduling system. In India, the government is able to collect health statistics
from private health care providers with varying degrees of quality.12

• There is significant fragmentation and duplication in data collection, because
governments, donors and implementing partners have little incentive to collaborate with others
on data collection, to share data, or to leverage existing systems. For example, early response to
the HIV epidemic in Zambia drove the creation of at least five patient data management
programs, because stringent data management is critical to effective HIV patient care, and
several actors provided HIV patient care by the mid-2000s. In many cases, health workers must
complete separate forms containing the same information for delivery to different agencies who
do not share data among themselves. National ministries of health are seldom in a position to
resist the demands of donors who fund large health care programs, and moreover the
incremental cost of collecting additional data is largely invisible to the donor, so there is little
disincentive to adding additional indicators that accumulate over time into very large workloads
for local health workers. Notwithstanding common pledges to work toward harmonization,
such as the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (so-called “Paris 21”), this remains a very
significant challenge for HIS in developing countries.
• The health information system is not used by those providing or managing health
services at the local level, as these individuals are often presumed to not need health
information of this nature. The data collected is determined by users far removed from the
actual delivery of health services, and seldom has relevance to improving those services. Donors
require indicators for purposes of program evaluation and not necessarily the improvement of
service delivery. Data flows in one direction, from those at the bottom doing the collecting to
those further up the chain of command. Health care providers do not have access to
information beyond their health facility, and as such are unable to compare their performance
to that of similar health facilities.
• Data collection is a significant burden on those collecting the data. These individuals
often have limited means and little incentive to collect complete or accurate data. In some
instances there are perverse incentives to exaggerate indicators to satisfy so-called “pay for
performance” arrangements where funding is tied to improvement in specified indicators.13 In
India, it is reported that health workers spend four to five hours per week completing
numerous forms with information from as many as 13 different registries, several of which
frequently require identical pieces of information. In Zambia, the data collection burden
significantly reduces the time that health care providers have to spend on improving the quality
of patient care. One head nurse said that if she and her team did not have to spend so much
time on reporting (five days per month), she could use her quarterly site report to discuss with
other nurses how to improve care.14
• Various independent systems are seldom integrated, which impedes the ability to leverage
data from multiple sources to increase the efficiency of operations or the sophistication of
analysis and decision making. In Brazil and in many developing countries, decentralization has
enabled the development of region-level or municipality-level health information systems that
are tailored to each area’s specific health information needs. Despite requests from the regions,
the national government has yet to step in to develop common standards that would allow
these systems to interoperate.15

Impact of ‘first generation’ HIS on patient First generation HIS have
health outcomes demonstrated significant impact
in improving patient health
Despite the shortcomings of first generation HIS, some outcomes and increasing the
efficiency of health systems.
of these systems have – perhaps surprisingly, given their Improvements have been
constraints – demonstrated significant impact in documented in:
improving patient health outcomes and increasing the
efficiency of health systems. Many anti-retroviral drug • Increased follow-up rates on
anti-retroviral drug campaigns
campaigns suffer from high rates of patients being lost to
follow-up.16 Electronic patient registry systems such as • Sharp reduction in emergency
OpenMRS or CDC’s SmartCare and CIDRZ programs in evacuation times and costs
Zambia, can help mitigate this problem.17 The EHAS • Dramatic shortening in TB
system in use in the Amazon region of Peru reduced diagnose time
mean evacuation time of emergency cases by 40%.18 An
economic evaluation of this system demonstrated a • Improved clinical efficiency
and laboratory revenues
significant cost savings, mostly due to more efficient use
of services.19 An email-based consulting service in The same first generation HIS
Cambodia was very well-received by its users, and was systems also share a number of
associated with a significant drop in mean duration of common traits or constraints:
patient chief complaint.20
• Anchored in the public sector
IT systems have been successfully used in the developing • Significant fragmentation and
world in pharmacy and laboratory management, as well. duplication in data collection
Programs such as the one described by Fraser et al. to
• Not generally used by those
support laboratory diagnosis of TB-positive sputum providing or managing health
samples can decrease the detection time for new cases, services at the local level
from a mean of more than a month to six days.21 A
• Data collection is a significant
system in use in Turkey dramatically reduced sample
burden on those collecting the
turnaround time, thereby improving clinical efficiency data
and simultaneously increasing laboratory revenue.22 The
PIH-EMR system deployed in Lima, Peru, accurately • Independent systems are
seldom integrated
predicted anti-TB drug usage by a subset of patients. Had
its model been used to order prescriptions, there would
have been a 30% savings.23
The need for a new concept of HIS
The promise and the shortcomings of current systems raise the question of what a successful HIS
might look like. While there are a number of variations, there is a clear pattern to many of these
conceptions, illustrated in the following diagram.

Population MOH
Survey
Population
National
Program
Vital Director
Registration
District
Health
Hospitals & Facility Data Analysis & Officer
Clinics Service Repository Reports
Records
Facility
Manager
Health
National Insurance
Health Records
Insurance Donor
Program
Officer
Public
Inventory Health
Supply Chain Researcher
Data
Figure 2 – Typical Vision of HIS
This conception recognizes the importance of bringing together data from different sources to
enable much more effective analytics. Inspired by models applied in modern business corporations,
it does not necessarily require the merger of all information systems (“data sources”). However, it
presumes the ability to map data sets from disparate sources into a single repository where analysis
can be performed seamlessly across all of them.
Leaving aside the technical challenges and resource requirements of creating a successful data
warehouse, from the viewpoint of a national health system this conception has several important
limitations.
• The problem of data quality is not directly addressed. So long as the burdens and
incentives surrounding data collection are not addressed, data quality will remain poor and
aggregating it in a data warehouse will not thereby improve it. Technology can help improve
data quality, but data quality is not primarily a technological problem. Investment in
sophisticated electronic storage is of limited value if poor data quality is largely a function of
the burden of existing data collection processes and the lack of incentives for accurate
reporting. Sao Paulo’s SIGA Saúde system addresses the question of data quality by
capturing data in “real time” as part of routine patient scheduling and care. The SIGA
Saúde system saves health care professionals time in data entry, creating a strong natural
incentive to report data correctly.

• The impact of health-related activity in the private sector is overlooked and is
neglected as a source of data relevant to setting policy for the health system as a whole. This
view of HIS is still focused on the public sector, that part of the health system that is most
visible and amenable to data collection. Systems that cover private providers, such as
Zambia’s SmartCare electronic health record system, will be able to gather data on
individuals in lower income strata. Such systems will also be able to monitor the quality of
privately provided care, improving care where needed.
• This conception often omits important potential data sources such as disease
surveillance and response systems, or environmental data such as water or air quality data,
which are particularly important in an age of fast-moving epidemics.
In many discussions about serving the needs of a national population via HIS there is a tendency to
focus on technology (the data warehouse). Technology has a role to play, but the benefits of an
information system are only incidentally dependent on technology. It can manage information
efficiently but cannot decide on the right information to collect or the right use of that information
once collected. This approach to HIS continues to view the information system primarily as a means of
collecting and storing data for the benefit of administrators, analysts, funders, and others while the
needs of those actively providing health services are neglected. People in the health system are viewed
as data providers, not as information consumers or active managers of their respective roles and
activities. So while they might well benefit indirectly from the results of data analysis conducted
elsewhere, the possibility that the HIS should directly enable more effective and efficient delivery at the
point of service is largely overlooked.
Movement Toward a National HIS in Developing Countries

In response to the health challenges they face, many developing countries have launched reforms of
their health systems and as part of those reforms they have undertaken to expand and improve their
HIS. Analysis of the health information landscape suggests that countries are moving from the
established paper-based system of district health information to the “second generation” HIS, where
health encounter data is used to not only inform policy but to improve care at the point of service. This
sub-section provides a categorization of health information systems today in five stages, as countries
move toward systems of greater scope, scale, and sophistication. Care should be applied in judging the
quality of a system by its level of sophistication, however, system quality is highly dependent on factors
such as system design, stakeholder buy-in, proper budgeting, and implementation.
Table 1 depicts the evolving sophistication of HIS systems, the quality of decision making that these
systems can support, and the capabilities required to sustain them. It is based on a survey of secondary
literature on 16 developing countries24 and primary research on three: India, Brazil, and Zambia (case
studies are in the following section of this report). The categorization captures in a general way the
characteristic features of national-level programs to collect health information. It is important to bear in
mind that any country will have many independent programs to collect and use health-related
information. These programs may be simple and paper-based, or may be high-functioning and
technologically advanced, as are many disease surveillance and monitoring systems for diseases such as
TB or HIV. Accordingly, the grouping below is not based on the range, or the total number, or the type
of individual data collection efforts. It is instead a view of some typical characteristics that differentiate
national efforts to move toward the creation of a fully integrated comprehensive HIS.

Stage 1 Stage 2 Stage 3 Stage 4 Stage 5
• Data collection is • Data collection is • Data collection is • Data captured in • Data captured
based on manual based on manual based on manual tallies course of routine electronically from
tallies from activity tallies from activity from activity registers transactions rather routine business ops
Data Flow and Collection
registers registers than collected. No (clinical and

• District data collection manual tabulation administrative)
• Multiple redundant • Focus on using existing converted to electronic from registers. Heavy
forms systems to collect an storage and reporting reliance on electronic • Integration of data
optimized and smaller data storage (some from multiple
• Data collection is set of data with a view • No change to basic paper-based data information systems at
external to routine to increasing data process of compiled collection may remain) all levels of health
operations, time quality, relevance. reports passed up system
consuming institutional chain. • Operational systems
• Collection burden (e.g., patient • Data collection
reduced, more rapid scheduling, lab provides decision
availability possible management, support for clinicians
pharmaceutical
modules) as data
source
• Disorganized and • District data collection • Formal electronic • Enabled individual IDs, • Full Personal Health
ineffective district normalized, simplified communication, EMR, appointment, Record for all
reporting storage and scheduling and individuals
• More rapid data automated reporting of reminders, facility
Data Utilization and Integration
• Data quality poor, long availability collected data operations capabilities • Complex reporting
delays in reporting (lab, pharmacy, etc.)
• Improved management • Increased analytics • Evidence-based
• No integration of decisions possible with • Systematic business decision making and
separate information quality data • Aggregated data not process analysis data-driven
systems tied to individual required management
• No integration with electronic medical
• Peer data from other other information records • Access to information • Integrates all
facilities or systems from all levels of significant health-
geographies rarely • Data from other service delivery related data from all
available facilities and network possible and component systems
geographies can be encouraged
obtained for peer • Explicit national
comparison • Public health data not policies on data
integrated standards and
interoperability
• Complex reporting
• Little or no computer • Little or no computer • Limited computer • Moderate to significant • Managers at all levels
literacy at local level literacy at local level literacy required for computer literacy strongly inclined to
Resources and Capacity
data entry at local required for larger using data to support

• Capacity for data • Basic capacity for data level number of users decision making
analysis limited, analysis at local levels
confined to central • Increased analytical • Substantial technical • Strong culture of data-
MoH • M&E capacity at capabilities skills required on driven management
central level ongoing basis
• Strong consistent
• Often local push for leadership and
national adoption, but support. National
no sustained national commitment to
commitment or funding ongoing funding
Scope: Modest - Same as Stage 1 Same as Stage 1 Greatly expanded with Maximized, with Stage
captures only district inclusion of patient- 4 data integrated with
indicators level data from health public health data
Scope
system transactions
(EMR), and resource
data (personnel,
medical supplies)
Can be country-wide Same as Stage 1 Projects often begin Sub-national because National, entire
depending on with one or two of increased resource population included
Scale
compliance and follow- districts, but aim for and capability

through (which is often nationwide deployment requirements
spotty)
Table 1 - National HIS Efforts in Developing Countries

Stage 1 Stage 1 Stage 2 Stage 3 Stage 4 Stage 5
represents Bangladesh
countries that Haiti
still rely on Kenya

Mozambique
unreformed Peru
district health Vietnam
information Ghana
systems of the India

Indonesia
type described in Mexico
Table 1. These Rwanda
are paper-based EthiopiaEthiopia
systems that are Zambia

China
a highly Sierra Leone
fragmented and South Africa
burdensome to Low Income

Uganda
health workers Lower Middle Income

Upper Middle Income
Sao Paulo
Belize
tasked with data
collection. Peru
is an example of
this stage. While Table 2 – Countries and Progression Along HIS Stages
it possesses
several successful small-scale HIS initiatives, it does not have a high-functioning health data collection
or analysis scheme operating on a nationwide basis. The majority of low-income, developing countries
reviewed for this study belong in this category, as do lower-middle income countries such as Peru and
Indonesia.
Stage 2 represents countries that still employ paper-based systems yet have undertaken an initiative to
address data quality, accuracy and timeliness by optimizing the type and amount of data collected and
reforming data collection processes. These initiatives explicitly focus on optimizing the existing paper-
based district health information system without any advance commitment to electronic technology.
Ethiopia is one such country in this group. In 2006, Ethiopia completed a full review and revision of
HMIS indicators and forms with notable results. Health posts that once collected indicators based on
an average of 353 varied data elements, now collect a uniform 50 standard data points. Health centers
that were collecting indicators based on an average of 401 data elements are now collecting a standard
150 data points, uniformly adopted throughout the country.
Though technology is not involved at this stage of development, the opportunities to optimize an
existing paper-based system are quite significant. For perhaps the first time, there must be a strong
country-level champion and a national commitment to reform. There must also be an effective process
for determining a reduced set of common core indicators, and then changes in the registers and log
books at all local facilities throughout the country. Lastly, donors must be aligned in support of the
initiative. As reflected in Table 2, many countries neglect this important step in making the move to
electronic collection and storage. Because duplicate and inconsistent data continues to be collected,
avoiding this step undermines the effort to improve data quality and only postpones the time when
leadership and consensus will be necessary to further progress.

Stage 3 represents the start of the electronic collection and storage of health data, to further address
the issue of data collection quality, accuracy and timeliness. Initiatives in this category may start off in a
few districts or states but proceed with the eventual goal of a nationwide rollout. Many initiatives result
in a hybrid system where paper forms are completed at the facility level and which are subsequently
entered into a computer at the district level. The NRHM HMIS project in India (subject of a detailed
discussion in the case study section of this report) is a prominent current example of a concerted
national effort to replace the entire paper-based district reporting system with an electronic one
ultimately encompassing thousands of local health facilities. It is accompanied by an effort to increase
computer literacy, but is hampered by the slow rollout of computers and connectivity to rural facilities.
In certain cases, innovative mHealth projects are being used to collect data that can feed directly into
the HIS. Uganda, for example, has a hybrid system of paper reporting at the lower levels and data entry
into a central “databank” at the national level.25 Yet the country also has several innovative mHealth
projects including the Uganda Health Information Network (data collected via PDA and transmitted
via wireless link). The TracNet project in Rwanda is another example mHealth. In this project, cell
phones are used to collect data on HIV patients. Sierra Leone is another notable example, which is
distinguished by the simultaneous effort to integrate the district reporting system with an electronic
medical records system (OpenMRS).
Depending on the number of indicators as well as the

software used for data entry, migration from a paper-based
to an electronic system does not necessarily reduce the The HIS Stages are based on
five dimensions:
burden on local health workers, but it does reduce errors
associated with manual aggregation of the data at higher • Data flow and collection
administrative levels. Electronic systems also make reporting
potentially much more flexible and efficient, because • Data utilization and
information can be analyzed at the district level as well as integration
above. Assuming the tasks required to optimize a paper- • Resources and capacity
based system are successfully completed, the challenges
associated with moving to electronic storage and reporting • Scope
are those related to support of the technology and system • Scale
users. Computers and infrastructure are needed. Usability is
critical, as many health care professionals have limited
computer literacy, and ongoing technical support of both hardware and software is required. The
transition to electronic data storage does however mean significant changes in the means and manner
of reporting. An important challenge, therefore, is the choice of reporting tools and the design of
reports. This however, presupposes a commitment to evidence-based decision making that empowers
health workers. In India, as the case study below further details, there is a concerted effort to provide
training and encourage the use of HIS data that accompanies the deployment of the new HMIS. An
additional challenge at this stage is consensus-building across relevant actors. At this stage, it is
extremely important that consensus is built, to lay the groundwork for future cooperation and use of
the system. The CDC-Zambia used a highly consensus-oriented approach to determining the indicators
that its system would collect in 2004, by many accounts generating significant goodwill across key
partners that became central to implementation.
Stage 4 represents a fundamental shift in HIS strategy, and a significant escalation of required
capability and resource demands. Initiatives in this category attempt to eliminate conventional data
collection conducted as a separate activity independent of the actual delivery of health services. Instead,

the initiative is to derive indicators from data captured as part of routine business operations. These
systems include EMR, but also pharmacy, laboratory, supply chain, human resources (HR), finance, and
other applications that support any many of the activities on which health care services are dependent.
These systems are in many respects similar to the enterprise-resource planning (ERP) systems used by
business. They manage health care at the point of service as well as satisfying the reporting needs for
higher level policy makers and donors.
Sao Paulo’s SIGA Saúde system, while regional in nature, is an example of a Stage 4 HIS initiative. The
SIGA Saúde system includes a unique patient identification system through its national bar-coded
cards, and the deployment of EMR-based solutions in all public health facilities in Sao Paolo. Users at
various levels in the health system are able to access health data and reports using the system. The
system has implemented data access rights such that users are limited to see only the data that they are
authorized to view.
Moving to operational systems, especially across multiple business functions and multiple facilities,
introduces very significant challenges for people, process and technology. Successful software projects
of this kind require clear goals, careful business process analysis, and a sense of ownership from all key
stakeholders. Because most operational systems consist of multiple modules or applications that
collectively must share data, the challenge of system interoperability is seriously confronted at this stage.
Because of the complexity of these systems, scalability is a critical issue. While there are evident gains in
efficiency and improvement in data quality, this comes at significant cost beyond the cost of building
and implementing software applications. The computer literacy requirements for end users and
technical support requirements for sustainability are significantly higher. For this reason these systems
are more likely to succeed in urban areas. Beyond this, applications like EMR require the ability to
uniquely identify individual patients, raising security and privacy concerns implicating national policy
and regulatory process. Altogether, the investment required and the risks are significantly greater in the
move to this stage.
Stage 5 represents a final step in the evolution of a comprehensive national HIS where all critical data
sources are available and fully integrated into a system that is adaptable and sustainable over time.
While no country can be said to have attained this stage, Belize can perhaps claim to be furthest along
in this direction (though the small size, relative homogeneity and wealth of the country make the
achievement of this level of integration much easier than most other countries considered in this
survey, and all system functions are not yet fully operational). There is strong and consistent
government support, stable funding, a clear and responsive policy and regulatory environment, a strong
culture of evidence-based decision making to manage the health system, and a very high degree of
automation. In many respects the challenge of getting to this stage, assuming the challenges associated
with previous stages are met, is one of optimizing the integration of the many applications and data
sources associated with the previous stage.
Note on the Stages: Countries may not fit neatly into this categorization, and progress may occur in
fits and starts. Yet this classification provides a useful framework for understanding the steps that
policymakers must manage as they develop their HIS, as well as the challenges associated with moving
from one stage to the next.

Cross-cutting ‘Second Generation’ Trends
HIS has become the subject of widespread and continuing interest among the medical community,
donors, and developing countries. Analysis points to several important trends across the “second
generation” landscape.
 Better information management tools at the local level. Greater emphasis on improved
primary care implies effective management of local health services by those who staff them and
administer them. This in turn implies that data on the performance of local facilities and
programs should be available to and used by local personnel. Yet data collected at the local level
is not used there, nor do many HIS save health care professionals time or help them to do their
jobs more effectively. In response, developing countries of all income levels have launched
programs that now explicitly focus on making health information available to practitioners at
the local level and encouraging its use to support patient care decisions, provide outreach, or
manage resources. Examples of these programs include The Baobab Health Partnership in
Malawi, the ZEPRS program in Zambia, the NRHM Health Management Information System
in India, and the SIGA Saúde in Brazil, each of which provides more effective support to
system end-users.
 Data capture through routine business operations. In developing countries today, most
health data is collected manually as a separate administrative task external to the routine activity
of providing health-related services. This increases the data collection burden by requiring that
data be recorded on paper or entered into the IT system more than once. Though still a small
trend, an increasing number of HIS are identifying how to use “real time” data capture for
EMR and patient-flow systems, or for resource management, as in Sao Paulo or Belize.
 Identification of minimum essential data sets. Growing criticism of the poor quality of data
collected is stimulating efforts to establish minimum core sets of indicators tracked to reduce
the burden of data collection and enhance comparability.26 In South Africa, the EQUITY
project, a collaboration between USAID and the National Department of Health, led an effort
to reduce the number and frequency of indicators collected by health workers, thereby relieving
a burden on workers and boosting the number of districts reporting each month.27 As noted
above, a similar effort has been made in Ethiopia achieving dramatic reductions in the number
of indicators and general standardization across the country.
 Growth of specialized technology and providers. Two software applications, DHIS28 and
OpenMRS,29 have been in existence for almost a decade, are backed by active open source
development teams and have now been deployed in numerous sites across the developing
world. Specialized non-profit groups such as Baobab Health Partnership30 and Inveneo31 are
developing specialized expertise in designing information technologies adapted to the most
severely resource constrained environments of developed countries. At least one company,
Voxiva Inc., now markets specialized solutions for health information applications for
developing countries, employing a subscription-based business model. As service-oriented
architectures develop, allowing deployment of complex web-based applications, larger
companies will join this trend. IBM is participating in a project in India to provide electronic
medical records throughout the country to any health care facility on a subscription basis
without the need to host or maintain any application locally.32 While the emergence of this

technical capacity does lead to valuable innovations, it can also have the negative effect of
encouraging premature resort to technological solutions, before other people and process issues
are addressed.
 Mobile devices become a key enabler for HIS. In

less than two decades, mobile phone networks have Several important trends are
expanded to cover the vast majority of the world’s evident across the “second
population, and penetration has been exceptionally fast generation” HIS landscape.
These include:
in developing countries with limited legacy wire-based
systems. In the same time, mobile devices have • Better information
transformed from being large bulky units offering management tools at the
nothing more than analog voice communication to more local level
slender and powerful computing platforms. As mobile
• Data capture through
networks continue to extend their reach, demand routine business
remains high and the markets have room to grow, operations
mobile phones will be a key enabler for health systems
• Identification of minimum
to reach their goal of providing health care for all.
essential data sets
Mobile phones will enable health care delivery end-to-
end, from rural village to urban center, populating a HIS • Growth of specialized
with more complete data and providing a richer view of technology and providers
the health of the entire population than health • Mobile devices become a
information systems have today. Mobile phones may key enabler for HIS
encourage more use of health care services because a
rural farmer can seek care using the phone instead of • Early experience yields
enthusiasm and
losing a day’s income to travel in to town to see a skepticism around HIS
doctor. If they are able to see more patients and deliver
better care through mobile technologies, health workers
may feel more empowered and more receptive to using
more HIS technologies. The rapid evolution of mobile devices has inspired a wide variety of
mHealth applications33 and attracted widespread attention. In Uganda, the Uganda Health
Information Network allows workers to collect and transmit information with wireless-enabled
PDAs to local access points, where it is then relayed to the central health database. Other
applications range from drug adherence monitoring to simple decision support systems that
facilitate screening of patients by counselors to make more efficient use of doctors’ and nurses’
time as well as gain access to specialists in cities and developed countries. For instance,
ClickDiagnostics offers a mobile telemedicine solution that equips a health worker with a
mobile camera phone to capture an image of a patient’s symptoms. They transmit it via the
mobile network to remote doctors who make the diagnosis, with the data going into a central
database.34 With solutions such as this, it is now conceivable that the rural poor can receive
better quality care. It should be noted that in developing countries, a common mode of access
to a mobile phone is through a shared phone, whether it is a phone shared amongst family
members or as part of a village phone program, so mobile solutions need to ensure data privacy
and security.
 Early experience yields enthusiasm and skepticism around HIS. There is an increasing
level of interest in and funding for projects to develop HIS, whether it is patient medical
records or mobile health solutions. HMN was established only four years ago at the May 2005

World Health Assembly35 and major foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, the UN
Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are supporting and funding eHealth and
mHealth initiatives and research. Education and capacity is building. Given the scarcity of
resources in developing countries, however, the opportunity cost of investments in technology
solutions encourages careful consideration of the incremental benefit provided by electronic
technology solutions. The early implementation experience of many HIS suggests that there is a
steep learning curve associated with successfully rolling out information systems in resource-
challenged environments, and many first-time electronic implementations have sacrificed quality
and performance as they have attempted large-scale rollouts. However, health information
management shows tremendous potential for improving patient outcomes in the developing
world. The Centre for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia (CIDRZ) was one of the
government’s first partners in the provision of ART services in Zambia’s capital, Lusaka. With
the support of the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), CIDRZ began
to provide support for ART services to Lusaka area clinics in 2004. After 18 months, CIDRZ
evaluated the impact of its program – a combination of coaching and financial incentives to
non-physician clinicians, supply chain management, facility restoration, and electronic data
management – on improving the survival rate of HIV-positive patients. Analysis found that
patient outcomes were good, and that electronic data management had been a major factor in
allowing the scale of care required by the program – by 2006, over 39,000 patients had been
enrolled in the program.36 As with other health information deployments in the developing
world, the CIDRZ experience suggests that health information systems hold tremendous
potential for facilitating the delivery of higher-quality patient care and appropriate resource
allocation. For HIS to realize this potential, however, HIS initiatives must be rigorously
evaluated, and findings must be shared and utilized within the health and health informatics
communities, to drive HIS design, implementation and funding decisions.

Case Studies
This section provides an understanding of the challenges and the

potential benefits associated with high-performing, interoperable Three HIS projects were
chosen as case studies:
health information systems in the developing world, as observed
in case study research in India; Sao Paulo, Brazil; and Zambia. • India: National Rural
Particular focus is given to how HIS can be structured to give Health Mission’s Health
frontline health care providers the information they need to Management Information
provide quality care and education to their patients and to local System
populations. This section will also illustrate some of the themes • Brazil: SIGA Saúde
described in the previous section of this report, the Landscape system in Sao Paulo
Analysis.
• Zambia: SmartCare
electronic health record
Overview of case study methodology system
Three HIS projects were chosen as case studies: the National Objectives of the field
Rural Health Mission (NRHM) Health Management Information research:
System (HMIS) in India; the SIGA Saúde system in Sao Paulo, • Establish the basic facts
Brazil; and the SmartCare electronic health record system in about the health
Zambia. These projects were chosen because they are significant information system
efforts to improve health information management in developing
• Identify the factors that
countries; because they have been rolled out in countries that are have helped or hindered
markedly different, in terms of geography and income level; and the HIS as they were
because they represent three major types of HIS deployments. developed or scaled
Case study research included extensive review of secondary
• Understand how health
literature on the health information systems, interviews with care providers used
experts familiar with the system, and in-country field research. health information, and
whether and in what
The field research on the HIS projects was carried out between ways each HIS supported
December 2008 and January 2009 in each of the three case-study pre-existing operational
or decision-making
countries. Field research included interviews with the Ministry of processes
Health, project management, implementing partners, system end-
users, and other health informatics experts in each country. It
included visits to sites that use the HIS under study, and in some cases, visits to sites that use alternate
health information systems.
The field research had three areas objectives. First, it aimed to establish the basic facts about the health
information system: the reason for the system’s development, the problem it was designed to solve, the
system’s champion and its funder(s), its objectives, its structure and implementation, and its impact, if
any. Second, the field research sought to understand the factors that have helped or hindered the health
information systems as they were developed or scaled. Research focused on understanding which parts
of the health information “value chain,” or the factors that influence the health information system,
were most influential. These factors can include government policy and regulation, organizational
structure and environment, or available human and financial resources. Third, the field research focused
on understanding how health care providers used health information, and whether and in what ways
each health information system supported pre-existing operational or decision-making processes.
Page 31 • Case Studies Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009

This section provides a profile of each of the health information systems studied. Each profile briefly
describes the reason for which the HIS was developed, what its goals and/or objectives are, how it is
structured and what its primary uses are, how the system has been implemented, what its results are (if
measured), and what the outstanding implementation challenges or next steps are. The chapter ends
with a discussion of the major lessons from analysis of the three health information systems profiled.

India
Introduction
Featured HIS Initiative:
Health Management Information
System for the National Rural India’s Health Management Information System (HMIS) is just
Health Mission (NRHM) as much an effort to employ technology to improve people’s
health as it is a mission to convince health workers at each level
Country: India
of government that good data can pave the way to better health
Population: 1.1 billion care.
GNI per capita (2007): $950 Home to a surging population of more than one billion people
spread throughout megacities and 600,000 villages, India faces
Acute Health Challenges: health care challenges of a scale and diversity unmatched in the
High child and maternal mortality
rates, malnutrition, infectious
developing world. Although the country’s economy has surged
diseases (malaria, HIV, TB), in recent years as a technology industry thrives in major Indian
chronic diseases cities, and the central government seeks to attract foreign
investment, much of the urban and rural population remains
Sponsors/Partners: National poor and without adequate access to quality health care
Rural Health Mission, National
Informatics Centre, National
services. The Indian government created the National Rural
Health Systems Resource Centre, Health Mission (NRHM) in 2005 “with an aim to achieving the
state governments targets set by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 4, 5,
and 6 and making the health delivery system more responsive
Key System Attributes: Web- to the health care needs of the people of India.”37 The program
based system that collects health
indicators for monitoring and is part of the government’s broader effort to increase health
evaluation of NRHM programs care spending from 0.9% to 2-3% of GDP.
Scale: Initial focus on 18 poor, The NRHM seeks to empower communities and health
rural states followed by workers through feedback and participatory mechanisms
nationwide deployment
designed to improve the quality of health services. Recently, the
Scope: Reproductive and child agency launched initiatives to improve basic health in rural
health and infectious diseases, in areas, with a focus on maternal and child health and infectious
line with Millennium Development diseases, the most critical health issues in rural India. With the
Goals (MDGs) 4, 5, and 6 NRHM introducing several major programs, a strong
monitoring and evaluation (M&E) effort is essential for tracking
program performance. At the heart of the M&E effort is the
Health Management Information System (HMIS), focused on improving the collection and use of data
related to core programs.
The HIS evaluated here is India’s HMIS. Field research focused on Chhattisgarh state, a newly created,
heavily rural state in eastern central India at the forefront in implementing the HMIS. The HMIS is
designed to streamline and automate the data entry process. The system also introduced new analytical
tools. The tools will allow analysis of rural health trends, specific health problems, and the performance
of the programs created to address those problems. The HMIS can also provide health workers with a
clearer picture of health conditions in their area as compared to other areas and enable the workers to
request more resources to improve care.

India’s rural health system: underfunded and overtaxed
Despite the rapid growth of its large cities, India remains a predominantly rural nation, with more than
70% of its people residing in rural areas.38 The vast publicly funded rural health system serves this
population, in accordance with the NRHM’s commitment to be more responsive to the health needs of
rural Indians. States are divided into districts, which are in turn divided into blocks. The system is
organized hierarchically, with each level reporting to the level above it, and is comprised of:
 145,000 subcenters, staffed by Auxiliary Nurse Midwives (ANMs), who provide care primarily
for women and children, and Multi-Purpose Workers (MPW), male workers who usually treat
male patients and provide them with referrals. Each subcenter serves five to seven villages, or
approximately 5,000-7,000 people.
 24,000 Primary Health Centers (PHC), staffed by a doctor and paramedical staff, with one
PHC per 30,000 people. Each PHC covers five to seven subcenters.
 3,400 Community Health Centers (CHC), block-level (the administrative unit just below the
district level), staffed by basic medical specialists (such as pediatricians) and nurses and
containing 30 beds. Each CHC serves 100,000 people.
 600 District Hospitals, staffed by more advanced medical specialists (such as urologists). Each
hospital serves one to two million people.
Although the NRHM aims to improve health services for India’s rural population, the system is
severely overextended. Many who can afford to do so seek treatment at private hospitals and clinics,
which are growing rapidly and which, by some estimates, constitute 68% of all hospitals in India.39
Issues with existing data collection systems
While the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MOHFW) in India has long collected data on health
statistics from all public and many private health care facilities, it lacks a coherent strategy for
integrating, synthesizing, and analyzing data to allow faster responses from the government. The
reporting process focuses on a top-down imposition of data requirements and pays little attention to
the need for information that can help health care workers improve patient treatment. Data quality is
poor, with little institutional incentive for health care workers and functionaries to improve it. Most
data entry is manual, forcing repeat data entry across as many as seven different layers of government
and causing untold hours of wasted time. Data analysis is also manual, which often results in the
government misunderstanding trends in health statistics. Finally, health care workers must collect up to
3,000 data points, according to divergent requirements laid down by central, state, and local
governments. These problems – consistent with those observed across developing countries – point to
the need for reform of the NRHM health information system.
Impetus for HMIS reform
The HMIS initiative began with the launch of the NRHM itself. As the agency unveiled a host of new
programs to improve rural health, the M&E division of the NRHM, as well as at the National
Informatics Centre (NIC), a key partner in the HMIS, agreed that the ineffective data collection and
analysis process described above had to be improved in order to determine the effectiveness of these

new programs. Mr. Pravin Srivastava, a director at the NIC, laid the foundation for the system in 2006,
though initial planning began earlier. The NRHM had four major tasks: build M&E capacity at the
national, state, and regional level; rationalize data and determine the number and frequency of necessary
indicators; contract with a software provider to develop a Web-based system; and build physical
infrastructure to transmit and house data.
Data rationalization proved to be the most difficult task. The M&E division determined approximately
200 critical indicators by exhaustively reviewing the indicators collected by each program area and then
identifying both redundancies and the minimum frequency of collection for each indicator. The final
list was approved by committee and accepted by the Additional Secretary of the MOHFW. As a
director of the M&E division reports, “it was a difficult and often ruthless exercise, and often
acrimonious” since program heads tend to try to protect their data elements.
HMIS overview
The HMIS initiative of the NRHM, implemented in conjunction with the NIC, seeks to:
 Improve the data collection and analysis process by taking steps to streamline data
collection, namely by identifying data points related to the NRHM’s primary goals and reducing
the data points from nearly 3,000 to about 200. Frequency of collection will be reduced from
monthly to quarterly, or annually, for most data points.
 Automate the data process by introducing a Web-based system that can be accessed at all
levels of government through the deployment of computer hardware and Internet connectivity
at facilities nationwide.
 Validate data by triangulating other data sources to verify and improve data quality. Validation
will also be achieved through the introduction of dedicated data managers, as far down as the
Primary Health Center (PHC) level, whom can identify and analyze data and work with
providers to improve collection and quality.
 Introduce analytical tools, starting at the central government and trickling down, that allow
health care workers and government officials to see and understand health trends and formulate
an effective response.
HMIS description
The HMIS is designed to aggregate data based on health indicators compiled by rural health care
workers. At the system’s core are approximately 200 indicators related to the areas of child and
maternal health and infectious diseases. (India has “siloed” programs for monitoring diseases such as
HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and leprosy.) The data are collected at the facility level and fed
progressively up to block, district, state, and central government levels, where it can be analyzed and
used to make decisions. Core indicators are entered digitally into the system at the block or district level
and aggregated to provide a statistical snapshot of India’s health indicators at each level of the system.
HMIS data quality is verified through a triangulation process, as described in the “Triangulation” box
on the next page.

How the HMIS is used
Triangulation:
Rural health care workers use the data to effect changes in A Framework for Identifying
Data Flaws and Their Sources
policy and treatment and to allocate resources more
effectively. The HMIS has two key features that enhance Poor data quality is a persistent
system usability: (1) enhanced analysis and (2) two-way challenge across health
information flows. Enhanced analytical features allow information systems. Data
authorized users to view and compare the performance of systems are typically not
structured to support frontline
different health centers and hospitals. Users are able to health care professionals in their
generate reports on different indicators for specific time decision-making. Instead, data
periods and compare them to earlier periods, and reports collection is often mandated from
can be viewed in both graphical and tabular format. The “the top” – a national Ministry of
Health or a vertical health
system also includes back-end, SAS-based analytical tools program. Data is infrequently, if
for higher-level users. ever, fed back down the system
for health care professionals’ use
Two-way information flows allow health care providers at in day-to-day health care
all levels to access data. The dedicated data managers decisions. As a result, the
individuals who are responsible
funded by the NRHM at the district, block, and PHC for collecting the data are not
levels will be able to access data for use in monthly motivated to do so, and data
meetings, where information collected in the previous quality often suffers.
month is discussed with health workers and
administrators. The data will also be provided to the newly This is clearly a problem in India,
where the data collected is
empowered gram panchayats, or village health councils, reported to be of poor quality.
which are charged by the NRHM with developing This issue is not limited to the
community health action plans for their villages. Village health sector. According to one
health councils will be assisted by female Accredited Social NRHM director, “There is a culture
of disrespect for data in India.”
and Health Activists (ASHA). The ASHA is a NRHM-
created position that will act as a liaison between ANMs To enhance data quality in the
and villages to improve data collection and the response to near term, the HMIS program
community health needs. The gram panchayats and emphasizes data validation.
NRHM officials verify data quality
ASHAs will have access to HMIS-generated data related to
through an explicit data
their areas, empowering them to create stronger “triangulation” strategy. They
community health action plans. These two-way data flows use data collected from health
are depicted in Figure 3. workers and compare it to (1)
information obtained from
household and community
While the Indian HMIS is intended to capture surveys and (2) “concurrent
comprehensive data about reproductive and child health evaluation” at facilities contracted
and infectious diseases, it will not cover all health by the government. This method,
encounters. Chronic diseases such as heart disease and combined with HMIS facility-
diabetes, which are growing problems in India and China, based reporting, will allow officials
down to the block level to
will not be comprehensively tracked, a fact acknowledged determine where data quality is
by health officials interviewed for this study: “We are poor and to take measures to
aware of the growth of chronic disease issues, but they are improve it, such as requesting
a greater problem in urban areas, which are not our focus,” funds for additional data or
medical staff.
said one NRHM official.

The system is, however, designed to
accommodate expansion and could eventually
include such conditions as the government
continues to address them. The HMIS is
currently integrated with the Gujarat Hospital
Management Information System (see box
below). The HMIS is not yet integrated with
India’s Integrated Disease Surveillance Program
(IDSP), the nation’s main surveillance program,
though the system’s architects are working to
develop an integration plan.
Project implementation to date
The national HMIS went “live” in October

2008. While the HMIS will eventually be
expanded to cover the entire country, it is
currently being deployed in the 18 states
designated “high-focus” by the NRHM (because
they are the most heavily rural states).
Automation will be introduced gradually at lower
levels, as infrastructure allows. In Chhattisgarh,
for example, automation initially will be limited
to the block level, where all facilities are
Figure 3 – Information Flow in HMIS
installing computers that will be connected to
Source: National Health Systems Resource
the Internet (connectivity has just been fully
established at the district level). Data collection
at the subcenter and PHC level will remain manual for now and will be aggregated and digitized at the
block level. With the national system online and operational, all states are entering data they collected
between April and October 2008 in order to provide a historical record and basis for comparison.
The Gujarat HMIS: Patient Record Capability, National Interoperability
While the NRHM HMIS will eventually cover all of India, it is a system of limited scope, designed to
collect information on indicators related to the NRHM’s core programs. At the state level, there is
innovation encompassing other HIS functions. Gujarat state in western India, for example, deployed
a Hospital Management Information System at its 25 district-level hospitals in 2007.
The system is a module-based application which includes a patient identification number that tracks
patients’ medical histories. It contains laboratory, pharmaceutical, human resources, and
equipment management units. The system is designed to give administrators the ability to
comprehensively oversee all aspects of hospital management and patient flow while providing
physicians with easy access to patient history as a means of improving care. Despite its complexity,
the system is still able to feed required indicators to the NRHM system. The Gujarat experiment
illustrates the need for flexibility in HIS design, allowing for local innovation while accommodating
national reporting requirements.

Many of the activities to date have focused on the operational and infrastructure requirements of the
HMIS. States vary in their progress, however. Chhattisgarh is one of several states that have already
achieved several milestones, including computer deployment at nearly all blocks; Internet connectivity
in all 16 districts; completion of HMIS training for all responsible state- and district-level staff; and
ongoing training for block program managers (BPMs) at the block level.
Intended results
The newness of the NRHM initiative means that there is very little data on outcomes; the deployment
of the system is ongoing, and there was no pilot project per se. The hope is that the HMIS will provide
several benefits to the health system, including:
 The ability to view up-to-date health data on individual administrative units, which will help
policy-makers align needs with resources and allow lower-level health officials and data
managers to compare their units’ conditions. This will ease the burden of arguing for increased
resources.
 Reduced data entry at the block level and above (when automation becomes available at the
lowest levels).
 Improved data accuracy via the reduction of required data points, the enhanced validation
methods used by the NRHM, and the addition of data staff at lower levels.
 Better data, which, in concert with the empowerment and feedback mechanisms being
instituted, will arm health workers with better information to “argue their case.”
Remaining challenges
Major challenges remain, several of which could stymie the HMIS implementation. Officials agree that
poor data quality is a serious problem, adding that the data streamlining and validation efforts noted
above are an attempt to mitigate the problem. There are several factors that contribute to poor data
quality. Perhaps the primary reason for poor data quality is the shortage of qualified personnel,
particularly those responsible for service provision, such as doctors, nurses, and ANMs. By some
estimates, only 30% of nursing positions in rural hospitals are filled, 40 and a single ANM often covers
five villages. These overworked ANMs typically spend four to five hours entering data each week.
NRHM officials hope that the training of ASHAs for each village will relieve the ANMs and improve
data collection and quality, as part of the ASHAs’ responsibility is keeping ANMs appraised of vital
events. The use of financial incentives for meeting specific goals, such as childhood immunizations,
also encourages some users to provide false data.
The volume and duplication of data and data entry have also impeded past efforts to improve health
information systems. ANMs in India must maintain up to 14 separate registries for different types of
data and are required to re-enter this information into forms that are sent to the PHC level for further
aggregation. The current HMIS initiative seeks to reduce the frequency and number of data points
collected, but until automation is introduced at the lowest level of service provision, re-entry will
adversely effect efficiency.

Perhaps the biggest “soft” challenge facing the HMIS project is cultural. Several MOHFW officials
lament the lack of respect for data in Indian government. Top-down data requirements with little
downward flow have left health workers with little incentive to accurately collect data. Instead, the
system could be used to ensure that the data are used to empower health workers, thus motivating
them to collect data accurately. Officials believe that involving the community in creating village health
plans will create a demand for better data. The logic is that health care workers will gain a clear
understanding of community needs, which will in turn motivate them to collect better data to address
those needs. Pravin Srivastava, a director of the NIC and an HMIS leader, said, “Indian government
employees have been just told what to do for so long that they don’t feel that they can create change.
They’ve forgotten how to make decisions. And so a type of devolution is essential. If workers are
empowered, they will learn that they have to use data to make their case for more resources and
assistance.”
The success of this HIS initiative – and the hopes of its sponsors – hinges on the notion that (1) the
feedback mechanisms created for workers and community members will incentivize them to collect
better data, (2) the addition of ASHAs and data staff will relieve the burdens on rural medical staff, and
(3) potential data validation strategies will improve the ability to identify sources of bad data. One
NRHM described Indian officials as “nervous” about the implementation of the project. If India
follows through on its commitment to triple health-care spending, and if resources for workers are
improved, then the HMIS might suggest that data have the power to improve health outcomes.

Brazil
Introduction
SIGA Saúde
The SIGA Saúde Health Information System (HIS) provides a
City: Sao Paulo, Brazil unique perspective on how innovative health information
systems can be conceived in a bottom-up fashion by
Population: 22 million municipalities or health districts as opposed to traditional top-
GNI per capita (2007):
down national-level systems; how these systems benefit health
$5,910 service delivery at or near the front line (in effect, the health
care units and workers); and some of the challenges in
Acute Health Challenges: integrating with and meeting the reporting requirements of
Respiratory and cardiovascular national level systems.
diseases, stroke, homicides and
pneumonia
Of particular interest is the success with which SIGA is
Sponsors/Partners: Sao Paulo addressing the needs of Sao Paulo’s large poor population. Of
City Department of Health the 14 million41 patients registered in the SIGA Saúde database,
close to one in every four earns less than $1 per day. This
Key System Attributes:
demographic is similar to conditions found in Sub-Saharan
Enterprise Resource Planning-like
system with electronic records to Africa.
manage resource allocation and
patient flow Recognizing the need to improve access to health care, Brazil
embarked on a major initiative to improve the national health
Scale: Regional, managing 20 system in 1998. Among other things, the reform led to
million health encounters per
year at 702 health facilities decentralized health care management and the creation of a
national patient identification system to ensure universal access
Scope: Resource management to health care.
and recording essential health
encounter data To manage health delivery in this decentralized setting, a
regional HIS was developed, one of a different caliber and
sophistication than those seen in the vast majority of the
developing world, and one that belongs at the higher end of the HIS landscape categorization (see the
Landscape Overview section of this document). As such, the HIS serves as model for other countries’
health information systems.
The HIS evaluated in this case study is Sao Paulo city’s SIGA Saúde. Implemented in 2004 by the Sao
Paulo City Department of Health, the system enables the management of health care services in the
city, home to about 22 million in the metropolitan area. SIGA implements and promotes all the
concepts, policies, standards, and norms of the Brazilian National Health System.
SUS health system and the context for the HIS
Recognizing the need to improve access to health care, Brazil embarked on a major initiative to reform
the health system. The initiative culminated in 1998 with an addendum to the Brazilian Constitution
that entitles all individuals to equitable, universal, and continuous health care. As part of the reform, the
present Brazilian National Health System, called SUS (Sistema Unico de Saúde [SUS], or Unified Health

System) was created in 1998. SUS stipulates that all citizens are entitled to free-of-charge
comprehensive health services. The system is funded and operated jointly by the three levels of
government: federal, state, and municipal.
The provision of health services is decentralized under the SUS model. All services are delivered and
managed at the municipal level based on programs that are defined and agreed upon in advance.
Monitoring and evaluation of service delivery is done at all three levels of government - federal, state,
and municipal. An obvious advantage of the decentralized model is that municipalities equipped with
the best possible knowledge of the demographics of their particular catchment areas can design services
and programs to reach hard-to-reach segments of the population.
Under SUS, health services are structured in three tiers (Figure 4). While the type of services provided
by each primary care unit can vary from one municipality to the other, the minimum set of services
provided include: internal medicine, pediatrics, gynecology, and dental services. Services provided in
Tier 2 include specialized treatments such as cardiology and endocrinology. Access to Tier 2 services is
controlled strictly through the use of referrals from primary care physicians. Services provided in Tier 3
are primarily high complexity procedures such as kidney substitutive therapy, oncology, nuclear
medicine, and prosthesis. Access to Tier 3 services requires prior authorization from the Department of
Health.
Tier 3
High Complexity
Tier 2 Authorizations Treatments
Specialized required from
Tier 1 Department of Health
Referrals by primary
Treatments
Primary Care care physicians
Health Care
Entry Point
Figure 4 - Structure of Health Services in Brazil’s National Health System
SUS encourages states and municipalities to provide primary health care by offering them special
incentives and financing to implement family health programs and other community health agent
programs. This emphasis has led to a strong preventive care mindset at local levels. According to Dr.
Ligia Neaime Almedia, Primary Care Coordinator in Campinas, “We believe in treating the person, and
not in treating the disease.”
The procedures and rules specified under SUS provide the requirements and “business rules” for
SIGA. Thus, the purpose and objective of the HIS is to implement the rules of the health system;
provide information to evaluate the functioning of health care delivery within the health system; and
ultimately provide tools to optimize and strengthen the health system.
Solving the needs of primary health care units
With a volume of about 20 million health encounters per year encompassing primary care
consultations, specialized consultations and hospital admissions, Sao Paulo city health officials
recognized that health care units have to be extremely efficient in the way they manage resources.

Specifically, scheduling appointments for primary care, specialty consultations, and referrals have to be
streamlined and optimized to maximize medical professionals’ time and minimize patient waiting times.
In 2004, the Sao Paulo Department of Health made the decision to invest in an HIS that could handle
all requests for health care services and allocate resources optimally – allowing for constraints such as
distance, availability, waiting time, and budget.42 They envisioned such a system benefiting multiple
stakeholders:
 Primary care unit staff can efficiently use its resources, as well as get timely information on
aspects of units that are overburdened or underutilized
 Patients benefit from reduced waiting times for appointments
 City health officials can access up-to-the-minute data on health network usage, providing
information for resource planning activities
 State and national reporting of health data can be automated; and more importantly, the data
can be collected as part of routine clinical operations
A very important advantage of the system is that it is used by and directly benefits health care units,
which has helped to ensure its longevity and continuity. Sao Paulo’s HIS has thrived despite several
changes in the city’s political leadership. As highlighted in the Landscape Overview section of this
report, a common deficiency of many health information systems is that data is not relevant to those
collecting data. The HIS is challenged with poor data quality and does not have impact on frontline
health care provision. The Sao Paulo system has generated real benefits for health care units, and in
doing so is becoming indispensable to the provision of health services
SIGA Saúde overview
Having developed clear goals for what the HIS should do, the Sao Paulo City health leaders recognized
the magnitude and complexity of building and deploying such a system and the need for strong
program management and software development processes.
The Sao Paulo City Department of Health envisioned an Information System that provides capabilities
found in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, which are typically seen in large corporations.
ERP systems are unlike traditional health information systems, whose primary purpose is to facilitate
health data collection and reporting. In the case of SIGA Saúde, the system automates key business
processes followed at the health department administrative level, and work processes at individual
health facilities. According to Dr. Lincoln Moura, president of Zilics, the developers of SIGA, “in an
ideal eHealth environment, it is not you that runs the system, but the system that runs you.”
The system captures essential health encounter information, such as who was attended to and by
whom, where, and when. This data provides valuable operational information on the health network
effectiveness and also provides the core foundation to capture comprehensive Electronic Health
Records for diagnostic and other clinical use.
Administrative and support staff at health facilities use the system for:
 Registering patients, health units, equipment, and medical professionals

 Scheduling of primary care and specialized consultation appointments
 Tracking immunizations
 Tracking health encounters
 Processing authorizations for high-complexity and high-cost procedures

Medical professionals at health facilities use the system for:
 Managing their schedules and patient appointments

 Reviewing patient attendance history
 Tracking pregnancies and identifying high-risk pregnancies

City health officials use the system for:
 Analyzing statistical information on the health network usage
 Analyzing the performance of special programs such as Mae Paulistana − a program to track the
progress of pregnancies
 Getting information that is required by the Ministry of Health

By recording health encounter data, a host of other functions such as health surveillance, service audit
and citizen information portals can be integrated later.
Figure 5 on the next page represents the Sao Paulo City Department of Health’s blueprint of the core
capabilities of the HIS. This blueprint suggests the sequence and order in which various features
needed to be built. Although such a product roadmap is an essential component of good Software
Development Life Cycle principles, other developing countries very rarely demonstrate such rigor.

Future Enhancements to the System Healthcare
Information
Management Support
Images Hospital Management Audit
Laboratory Exams Electronic Health Record Health Surveillance
Features Pharmacies Delivery

Currently
Available
High Complex/Cost
Procedures Primary Care Specialized Encounter
Pharmacies
Authorization Schedulling Schedulling Record
(APAC)
Foundational
Training
Elements
National Health Patient Professional and
Infra-structure Register Health units
Figure 5 - Key Features of SIGA Saúde

Source: Sao Paulo City Department of Health – Information Technology Unit
System implementation
Sao Paulo city officials recognized that the construction and deployment of an HIS is a complex
endeavor. As such, best practices for planning, management, development, training and support of
large-scale software initiatives needed to be brought to bear on the HIS implementation.
From the outset, the project was carefully planned and structured to ensure comprehensive
management. First, system features were grouped into modules, and individual project leads were
charged with the construction of each module. The four major modules were:
1. Municipal Health Registry processes and records identification of health care users, workers,
and organizations;
2. Patient Flow Control, which processes scheduling and appointment requests for various health
care services;
3. Electronic Record, to collect a small set of health encounter data; and
4. User Access Control, to build user profiles that provided access to appropriate system functions
based on the authorization of that user.
Use cases, a best practice in software development, were created for each of these modules. The use
cases, numbering about 400-500, provided the basis for the construction of the system and also for
validating that the system behaved per specifications. The use cases were defined at a level of detail that
closely matched system functions and associated software components.

Second, a Program Management Office (PMO) was Building Blocks for an ERP-like System with
established to oversee the HIS project, resolve issues EMR
in a timely manner and provide strategic direction. First and foremost, Sao Paulo needed to
The PMO consisted of several subcommittees, construct a patient register database with
staffed with top-level managers and project leads. The capabilities to uniquely identify patients. To this
end, the city created a SUS Card that contains a
PMO included the Health Secretary, the Health CIO, unique patient identification number along with
project managers of all sub-projects and other basic demographic data. This information
representatives from vendors of various sub-systems. is stored on a barcode printed on the card,
which can then be accessed using barcode
readers by health facilities and pharmacies.
Third, the City addressed the issue of providing
training and technical support to every health care
unit. The City created an internship program in which
high school and college computer-science students
were trained and deployed as technical support agents
to primary health care units. These “facilitators,” as Figure 6 - SUS Card
they are called, were dedicated support specialists Source: Sao Paulo City Department of Health
who knew how to operate the system and were tasked Although the card is issued by local municipal
with providing technical assistance to users in the departments of health, the intent of the
health care unit. They served as a technical liaison program is that patients would be able to use
their cards to access public health care
between health care units and the city’s central anywhere in the country.
support call center, resolving technical issues that
Another key requirement to build an ERP-like
could not be resolved by the health care units. system is the registry of health care units,
equipment and all health care workers. A
Lastly, the City deployed the system. A range of provider registry constructs a comprehensive
deployment strategies were considered, including (1) a picture of the resources – physical, human and
technology – available for deployment in the
vertical strategy of full deployment of all features to delivery of health services, providing a snapshot
an entire region in one of the City’s five regions, of the supply side of resource planning.
followed gradually by other regions coming “online;” This approach to health information
(2) a horizontal strategy of deploying select features management also enables real-time data
to all health care units in all regions followed capture, an emerging trend in developing
countries. Assuming that the electronic system
gradually by other features; and (3) a hybrid model requires no more data entry than the paper
that mixed elements of both strategies. The hybrid system that preceded it, real-time data capture
model was selected, and is being employed to rollout enables end-users to save time in data entry
once they’ve overcome the “learning curve.”
of the system. The following table shows information
on current system usage.
Item Amount
Health care Units Using SIGA Saúde 702
Primary Care consultations Scheduled / month 1,017,463
Specialized Consultations Scheduled / month 189,393
High-cost Procedures Requests Processed / month 35,123
Patients Registered 14,301,383
Prescriptions Over the Counter / month 1,738,807
Table 3 - SIGA Saúde System Usage

Source: Sao Paulo City Department of Health – IT Unit

Results and impact on health service delivery
Considering the primary goal of the system, which is to improve access to health care, Campinas health
officials indicated that, without adding any new resources, such as health workers or health care units,
they have seen a 30% increase in patient visits. The city of Camacari reported an increase in patient
satisfaction from 32% to 50%. Preliminary results from Sao Paulo indicate that outpatient services
productivity has increased by about 35%.
Next steps
As SIGA proves its success as a bottom-up HIS model, users are beginning to consider how the system
might be improved and expanded. First, the Ministry of Health might establish standard data formats
and electronic submission guidelines, and make it easy and inexpensive for regions to integrate with
national systems. The national network of health information systems is comprised of a few hundred
disparate platforms that are poorly integrated, if at all. The National Health Card project helped clean
up some of this fragmentation by defining a standard core data set, as well as a shared view of the
patient, the health care worker and the organization location where the service was performed.
Second, the Ministry of Health might support the establishment of best practices in implementation, a
common code base, or a technical support team. With SIGA showing promising early results, several
other cities are either implementing the system in their own municipalities or have expressed interest in
pooling resources to form a coalition of neighboring municipalities for joint implementation, software
hosting and system support. A critical need expressed by IT officials in both Campinas and Camacari is
the need for a community to share best practices in system implementation across cities, ensure a
common code base and provide support for technical queries. With limited local budgets, it is difficult
for states and cities to both hire seasoned project developers and invest in computer infrastructure for
health facilities.

Zambia
Introduction
SmartCare Electronic Health
Record System In 2001, Zambia had a 15.6% HIV prevalence.43 With increasing
awareness of the potential consequences of the epidemic, the
Country: Zambia government of Zambia took decisive action against the
epidemic. They passed legislation to enable Zambia’s National
Population: 11.7 million
HIV/AIDS Council (NAC) to apply for the international
GNI per capita (2007): $800 funding required to fight HIV. The government earmarked 10%
of their 2002 to 2004 budget44 to respond to the epidemic,
Acute Health Challenges: HIV, declared HIV/AIDS a national emergency, and committed to
infectious diseases (malaria, TB, providing more than 10,000 people with anti-retroviral therapy
diarrheal illnesses), maternal and
child mortality (ART) by the end of 2004.
Sponsors/Partners: Ministry In 2004, the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief
of Health of Zambia, US (PEPFAR) stepped in with $81.6M to fight HIV/AIDS in
President’s Emergency Plan for Zambia. PEPFAR funding created an opportunity to introduce
AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), US
Centers for Disease Control and
an electronic health record. The HIV epidemic would require
Prevention (CDC) better management of patient health information; if patients’
ART was not carefully monitored, patients could develop
Key System Attributes: resistance to progressive rounds of therapy and ultimately
Distributed database system exhaust their treatment options. Because patient information
providing a smart card portable
patient health record to each management was critical to an effective response to the HIV
patient and a touch screen for epidemic and because the lifetime risk of a 15 year old dying of
provider data entry AIDS was 50%, PEPFAR incrementally agreed to fund a general
electronic patient health record system.
Scale: 400 health facilities, with
250,000 patients registered
The CDC used PEPFAR funding to create the SmartCare
Scope: Health records for ante- Electronic Health Record System. SmartCare’s aim is to enhance
natal care and HIV treatment the continuity of care in Zambia by providing each Zambian
modules, with family planning, with a portable, electronic health record. SmartCare is the object
outpatient, lab, pharmacy and of the current case study.
under age 5 modules to be added
in 2009
Zambian health system and context for the HIS
Zambia has a three-tier health system, with 144 health posts,

1,533 health centers at last count, 106 hospitals, and 81 Ministry of Health administrative facilities.
There are a significant number of private health centers, but their numbers are not accurately
quantified. Most other primary care is provided by traditional healers.
Zambia’s health system is affected at all levels by shortages of qualified medical personnel. Indicatively,
the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends a minimum of 20 physicians per 100,000 people.
Zambia falls far below this minimum threshold, with 12 physicians for every 100,000 population.45

Need to streamline patient record keeping
In the early 2000s, Zambia’s patient health records were maintained on paper. Records were often
incomplete, cumbersome, and not fully used in patient care decisions. Moreover, despite the severe
health care worker shortage, health care professionals were expected to spend significant time on
reporting. Even with a recent streamlining of the paper reporting process as shown in Figure 7, the
same pieces of data may need to be re-entered or re-counted up to four times before reaching the
district health information office, where the data would be entered a fifth time into the government
Health Management Information System (HMIS).
+ + + = 4x
Health Centre Number of times
Safe Motherhood Safe Motherhood Service Delivery one piece of data is
Ante-Natal Card Register Activity Sheet Aggregation Form entered
Figure 7 - Data Flow at a Representative Health Facility
An additional challenge specific to any ART-related patient record systems were the legacy systems that
ran in support of ART treatment programs. By late 2004, there were at least five ART-related patient
record systems that were already running at ART treatment programs in Zambia (Table 4). As the
programs required rigorous patient management, each program had needed to rapidly develop a system
for managing patient records. Any nationwide ART patient record management system would need to
replace these legacy systems. It would need to re-deploy hardware, software, and training to all sites that
had already received these resources for other programs, and it would need to convert data into the
single national system. In some cases, such as with Catholic Relief Services (CRS), the site would have
to replace the system used across ART programs in Africa with a system that was specific to Zambia.
Any program that was national in intention, as SmartCare was, would need to gain the acceptance of
organizations running alternate software programs.
System Name Organization
CareWare Catholic Relief Services (CRS)
Fuschia Doctors Without Borders
Patient Tracking System Centre for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia (CIDRZ)
ART Information System (ARTIS) HSSP
Table 4 - ART Patient Record Management Systems in Zambia, 2004
Driving force behind SmartCare
With Zambia’s first round of PEPFAR funding expected in 2004, the CDC suggested that an electronic
patient record system could create a complete health history for each Zambian and reduce the reporting
burden. In late 2004, the Ministry of Health endorsed the CDC’s proposal to launch an electronic

patient health record system. It was felt the program had the potential to revolutionize health services
delivery in Zambia. Mark Shields, the CDC’s head of epidemiology and strategic information in
Zambia, wrote to the Ministry, “This application…could become a transforming technology for
continuity of health services, much as cell phones have been for voice communications.”46
2004 was spent intensively preparing for SmartCare (then called the “Continuity of Care” program).
Most importantly, the CDC met extensively with the MoH, WHO, and other key partners to identify
data requirements and agree upon the best patient identification format. Key actors recognized the
strength of this approach, and the significant effort made by the CDC early on to generate their input
on the important, nationwide SmartCare program. The CDC also assessed existing information
management systems and practices in Zambia. It built its own software development team and
supported the MoH in hiring software development staff. Finally, the CDC developed the SmartCare
proposal, and PEPFAR approved the program in October 2004.
SmartCare overview
The vision for the SmartCare program is that “each person in Zambia has a complete electronic health
record that is used to assure them of a continuity of high-quality, confidential care, by providing timely
information to caregivers at the point of service.”47
Each Zambian carries an electronic card issued by SmartCare that stores her health record. This is
called a “SmartCard.” SmartCare has two objectives:
1. Improve patient care;

2. Improve health management information for improving health services);
Each SmartCare objective is described as follows:
Greater continuity of care
SmartCare aims to improve continuity of care by building a complete patient health record
SmartCare “modules,” or areas of care. After a consultation, a health care professional or
data entry associate uses a touch screen to enter patient data into the health facility’s
distributed database. The patient’s health data is then saved in the database and on the
patient’s SmartCard. The system can synchronize health records on a monthly or periodic
basis via flash drive, across all facilities that the patient has visited. This provides
reconciliation of patient records in the absence of the SmartCard (for example, if the card
were lost). The end-goal is to ensure that each patient has a complete, up-to-date, and
confidential health record for each visit to a health facility.
Increasing the privacy of sensitive medical information
All patient health information is transitioned from paper files to the SmartCare database
and the SmartCard. The SmartCare databases are governed by role-based security protocols
that bar those who are not care providers from accessing patient health records. Data
merges between health facilities are limited to records for patients who had visited both
facilities. Data merges at the district level hide patient identification, and data merges at the

province level strip patient identification. Today, HIV patients do not receive a SmartCard,
so that SmartCard will not be associated with HIV positive status. Instead, they receive a
tagboard card with their ARV treatment information.
Reducing the burden of paperwork on health clinic staff
SmartCare has aimed to enable electronic data entry of patient health information so that
health facility staff do not have to manually collect and aggregate data. The system allows
three modes of data entry: “e-first” is entry of client data as the client is cared for; “e-fast”
is entry after a client consultation, but before the client leaves the health facility; and “e-
last” is entry after the client leaves the health facility.
Improving the quality of information and decision support at the patient level, with inputs into
the HMIS
SmartCare seeks to make a complete patient health record available to the clinician. A full
patient health record gives the health care professional a complete view of the patient’s
medical history, enabling the professional to make better care decisions. SmartCare also
collects data required by the HMIS for the modules that SmartCare covers and loads this
data into the HMIS.
The Zambia SmartCare system
Facility software and hardware
At the health facility, the SmartCare package includes

SmartCards (Figure 8); a SmartCard reader; a desktop
computer equipped with a touch-screen and the
SmartCare software; a printer; an uninterrupted power Figure 8 - Zambia SmartCard
supply (UPS) battery back-up; a power strip; and a flash
drive for transporting data to the health district or other health facilities. At one
workstation per facility, this package would cost roughly $2,000 per facility.48
Distributed database ‘network’
SmartCare operates on a distributed database, designed to accommodate the lack of

Internet connectivity in much of Zambia and the perceived difficulty and high cost of
designing private wireless networks. Each facility maintains an off-line database. The
system is constructed so that databases could be easily copied and merged at the district
level, with patient data hidden at that level.
Project management structure
SmartCare’s project management structure reflects the division of labor between the CDC and the
MoH. The CDC manages PEPFAR funding, the project content, on-going software development, and
relationships with implementing partners, while the MoH is responsible for the national program
rollout.

Heath information personnel within Zambia observe that the shared management function has made
accountabilities unclear. In addition, the CDC’s role as both “funder”49 and implementer means that the
CDC has considerably more influence in project decision-making and often chooses to exercise this
influence. In multi-stakeholder projects, participants may have differing agendas while sharing the same
vision of improved health services, and the resulting friction may sometimes result in tension over
project implementation, which is a struggle in this and all comprehensive health information system
solutions.
Implementation to date
Each year has represented a different stage of SmartCare’s implementation. SmartCare was launched in
2006, after a 2005 pilot. The pilot demonstrated that patient record capture is possible in “e-fast” mode,
and that patients hold on to their SmartCards between visits. SmartCare was rolled out in 2006 to each
of Zambia’s nine provinces and 72 districts, starting from the national level down to the health facility
level. Training was provided at each level of the health system. Districts chose sites, using high patient
volume as the primary criterion for site selection. A limited number of other sites were added in order
to increase the equity of site distribution. At the outset,
SmartCare’s main implementing partners were the Driving Efficiency by Streamlining Paper
Zambia Prevention, Care, and Treatment Program Forms
ZPCT and CIDRZ, which were responsible for
In 2004, the organizations in Zambia that
implementation in the north and the south of Zambia were running HIV care and treatment
respectively. programs used 17 different ART forms
with disparate data fields and different
SmartCare was chosen in 2006 as the national ART field names (e.g., “gender” v “sex” or
“full name” v “Christian name”) for
reporting standard for facilities capable of supporting a common fields. That year, Zambia’s MoH
computer. The MoH completed the standardization of initiated a major effort to standardize
its ART forms (box to the right). At the end of this the ART reporting forms used across the
process, the MoH felt it was best to support the new, multiple agencies and facilities providing
ART services.
single set of ART forms with a single software
system. The use of different systems for HIV treatment, Dr Albert Mwango, the MoH National ART
care, and reporting created vertical reporting structures, Coordinator, spearheaded this effort,
and drove inconsistencies across the care offered by bringing together key partners in HIV
care and treatment. Partners included
multiple service providers. To eliminate duplicate patient the MoH, ZPCT, CRS, CIDRZ, HSSP, nine
record systems as well as to raise the quality of such hospitals, and the MUTI Medical Center.
systems, the MoH established SmartCare as the national
ART reporting standard for facilities capable of The effort was widely seen by
stakeholders as a success – “amazing,” in
supporting a computer and the ART Information the words of one. By 2006, the MoH and
System (ARTIS) for all other facilities. its health partners had developed a single
set of ART reporting forms. These forms
In a 2007 re-organization of the MoH, SmartCare’s are used by health partners across
Zambia today and served as the backbone
organizational “home” moved from the Public Health for SmartCare’s ART treatment module.
and Research Director to the Sub-Directorate for
Monitoring and Evaluation. In August 2007, the
Ministry requested CDC support deploying SmartCare to an additional 900 sites by the end of 2009.
In 2008, the MoH began to take greater responsibility for site support. By the fall of 2008, the Ministry
had deployed the system directly to the majority of SmartCare sites. For its part, the CDC is focusing

on the conversion of pre-existing ART patient management programs to SmartCare. It has also been
able to fund smaller scale initiatives that show high potential for success in the long run. These include
a full, “e-first” implementation at the Maina Soko Military Hospital in Lusaka, and a complementary
blood transfusion management program at the Zambia National Blood Transfusion Service (ZNBTS).
Today, SmartCare is deployed in more than 400 health facilities in Zambia’s 72 provinces. In 2009, the
MoH aims to continue SmartCare deployment, including deployment at the hospital level. The CDC
will focus on converting data from legacy ART patient management systems into SmartCare and on
adding modules for family planning, care of children under five years of age, and general outpatient
services.
Overcoming implementation challenges
SmartCare is a large and complex deployment, in which multiple stakeholders must coordinate activity
to implement a novel health information technology in health facilities across Zambia. SmartCare’s
stakeholders cite several implementation challenges that they have had to overcome in rolling out the
system.
First, SmartCare has had to strike a balance between rapid deployment and allowing sufficient time for
each district and health facility to be effectively trained and supported. According to Mark Shields, the
CDC is committed to helping the ministry deploy SmartCare to every health facility in Zambia. In part
because of donor pressure, the ministry probably “pressed the limits for speed of deployment, when
there was a need for a consolidation phase with more training,” he said, though by early 2009 the pace
of deployment had moderated, allowing SmartCare to provide additional training to ensure that users
understand the system and its features.
A second challenge has been in deploying a sophisticated information system in an environment where
limited technical support and expertise exist. For example, viruses have proven difficult to manage: It is
hard to consistently update virus protection software because many computers lack connectivity, and it
is easy to transmit viruses by flash drive. Managing virus issues across sites has taken time that was
intended to be invested in training end users on how to use the system. Yet the installation of
SmartCare has also created positive externalities, for example, by driving demand for increased
technical capacity, with the ministry upgrading its requirements for district health information officers
and speeding up the provision of electricity to clinics. These developments highlight the difficulties
inherent in deploying information technology in low resource environments, but they also illustrate the
ways in which these deployments may have unanticipated benefits.
A third challenge is striking a balance between the necessity of collecting enough data to provide a full
patient health record and the importance of teaching clinicians how to use the health record to improve
patient care. In the United States, the Marshfield Clinic, a Wisconsin facility that has used electronic
health records since 1985, has found that electronic records improve patient health outcomes only
when patient data is analyzed to identify trends and adapt patient care accordingly. As Dr. Carolyn
Clancy, the director for the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, has said, “…the electronic
health record itself is no silver bullet.”50
SmartCare’s focus on building complete, electronic patient health records has focused on
institutionalizing the data entry process, so that clinicians will have complete patient data as they are
trained to interpret and use that data to improve patient care. When SmartCare is rolled out at the

facility level, the first priority is to enter new patient data into the system, and the second priority is to
enter patients’ old paper health records into the system. Patient data is entered after the patient
consultation, oftentimes by data entry associates hired for the purpose of SmartCare data entry. The
data entered into SmartCare already allows the generation of over 60 reports that can be used by
clinicians and facility managers. SmartCare’s management acknowledges that training clinicians to use
data effectively in patient care is a multi-year process, but believes that the offloading of data entry
responsibilities from care providers and the complete records that SmartCare provides will result in a
more positive attitude on the part of clinicians towards data and the benefits it can provide.

Case Study Findings
In spite of their differences, remarkably consistent lessons emerge from comparisons of HIS in India,
Sao Paulo in Brazil, and Zambia. This section will present these lessons in brief, while also providing a
transition to the following chapter, which will discuss the challenges and opportunities implied by the
case study research, expert interviews, and landscape analysis.
Lessons learned
System interoperability is rare, but can be hugely beneficial. Case study research suggests that it is
likely that countries will have several HIS, for a number of reasons. Countries may have different HIS
due to decentralization or a proliferation of donor-driven health programs. HIS in decentralized
countries are likely to differ across regions, districts, or even municipalities, as is the case in Brazil. Sao
Paulo’s SIGA Saúde system is well established, while the cities of Campinas and Carnacari are
beginning to develop their own systems.
In some cases, the lack of interoperability is associated with legacy systems. In Zambia, the government
HMIS and SmartCare have very similar – if not parallel – data-reporting structures from the district
level upwards, despite the commitment of the government and other key actors to coordinating
reporting frameworks in the health sector. In India, older state systems have yet to be made
interoperable with the new national HMIS in part because of technical challenges associated with
creating compatibility.
Patient populations, resources, and environmental constraints may also differ, and may create the need
for different HIS solutions. The Zambia Electronic Perinatal Record System (ZEPRS) run by CIDRZ
collects a robust set of antenatal care data from Lusaka’s University Teaching Hospital, which sees the
country’s most complex medical cases, and from Lusaka area clinics. The data are analyzed to identify
changes in clinical practice that can improve patient health outcomes, and Lusaka area clinicians are
then coached on the changes they can make to improve clinical practice. By contrast, the Kasisi Rural
Health Centre does not treat complex HIV cases, lacks electricity, and uses limited medical equipment.
The center uses a paper-based data management system and its clinical officer uses paper-and-pencil
graphs of his own design to track disease trends. For specific care areas, the data is analyzed by CIDRZ
and used to provide clinician coaching in much the same way that data collected by ZEPRS is.
These examples suggest that a given country is likely to have more than one health information system.
Interoperability at scale is rare (the interoperability of India’s NRHM and Gujarat’s Hospital
Management Information System is one notable exception), but is extremely important. Interoperability
can eliminate duplicate data processing, and can allow each system to focus on meeting the needs of its
core users, while optimizing the functionality of the health information system as a whole.
Health information systems must be adapted to their environment and to user capabilities. In
the previous example, the ZEPRS and the paper-based data collection systems are arguably appropriate
to the environments in which they operate. In the case of health centers like the Kasisi Rural Health
Centre, it is not certain that an electronic health record system will have more impact on patient
outcomes than an efficient paper-based system or more clinician coaching opportunities. To
accommodate the lack of software and hardware adapted to rural environments and novice computer
users, the Indian NRHM’s HMIS will initially be automated only to the level of community health

centers. Internet connectivity is being extended to support these health centers. Data collection at most
of India’s 24,000 primary health centers and 145,000 sub-centers will remain manual for the time being.
Deciding what data to collect might be hard, but the effort is worth it. The data harmonization
efforts in Zambia and India highlight the challenges and the tremendous benefits associated with
limiting the data elements collected to those that are required to provide effective patient care or to
monitor programs, standardizing data collection across agencies, and reducing the frequency of data
collection. The harmonization effort led by Dr. Mwango of Zambia’s Ministry of Health reduced 17
different ART forms to a single set used by the major HIV care and treatment partners in Zambia
today. The coordination effort initiated by the NRHM’s M&E division in India reviewed the 3,000
indicators collected by its siloed health programs, and entailed securing agreement from program heads
on the approximately 200 indicators that would best inform whether the NRHM was reaching its
primary goals. Both of these initiatives have or will enable major time savings in data collection and
analysis. In addition, they have arguably increased the quality of care and health service delivery by
focusing attention on a manageable number of indicators that are closely related to patient care and
service provision.
If an HIS directly benefits its data collectors, it will produce higher quality data and will be
more likely to last. Sao Paulo’s SIGA Saúde system provides a strong example here. Staff at health
facilities in the city of Sao Paulo use SIGA daily to make their jobs easier. In the past, patient
scheduling for referrals and follow-ups was painful, because facility administrators had to co-ordinate
with other facilities before they could suggest an appointment date and time to patients. As a result,
patients had to wait up to three months for referrals or follow-up visits. With SIGA, all schedule
information is available centrally to authorized users. When an assistant goes to set up a referral or
follow-up consultation, the system will automatically suggest a facility, the doctor, and the appointment
time based on a number of factors, such as distance between patient’s home and health facility, the
soonest available time, and so on.
These design features help to enhance data quality and system longevity. Because SIGA makes the jobs
of health facility staff easier, health facility staff have little incentive to report false data. And because
SIGA generates tangible benefits for health facility staff (the “data collectors”), it is a popular program
and would be difficult to eliminate without significant resistance.
HIS are more likely to be successful when they are part of a broader effort to reform the health
sector. Aligning the development of a new HIS to a larger reform effort not only promotes consistency
between the health system and the HIS, it also creates champions for effective data collection and
analysis. It is not too much to suggest that HIS and strengthening are interdependent. Strengthening
depends upon quality information about the performance of the health system, but HIS reform
depends on a larger commitment to health system strengthening as well. In India, the newly-launched
NRHM created its HMIS in order to obtain data that evaluated the success of its programs, which gave
it a strong incentive to see that the system is implemented effectively, and the desire to see this new
agency succeed lent it crucial support from senior officials in the ministry of health. This support was
essential to the data rationalization effort that reduced the number of indicators collected by health
workers. In Brazil, the SIGA Saúde system in Sao Paulo may have been developed for the city, but its
alignment with the health insurance and health identification programs created by the federal
government has allowed it to operate smoothly within the national health system. It has also made it

easier for the federal government to support the
program and provide funding, since system
Maina Soko Military Hospital uses SmartCare
parameters were defined by those who were to streamline HIV case management
highly familiar with the needs of the Brazilian
health system. The Maina Soko Military Hospital (MSMH) is
located in central Lusaka, serving military
personnel, their families, and individuals in
Electronic health information systems are the local catchment area. Prior to the
relatively new, so deliberate approaches to MSMH’s SmartCare implementation, HIV-
implementation are essential to lowering risk positive patients at Maina Soko carried large
blue files from consultation to consultation.
– and can foster innovation. The Each file had a patient care code denoting
implementation experiences of the three projects HIV status prominently displayed in large
profiled in this chapter point to the need for a letters on the outside of the file.
deliberate approach to implementation. The city
The hospital implemented SmartCare in early
of Sao Paulo fully deployed to only one of the 2007. Though the initial intent was to use
city’s “regions” (as districts are known) at a time, SmartCare in “e-fast” or “e-last” mode,
enabling the city to learn lessons from each Maina Soko leadership pushed the CDC-
deployment and to adapt each rollout to the Zambia to provide enough computer units for
Maina Soko to be “e-first” so that patients
specificities of each of the city’s regions. Dr. would no longer have to carry their thick
Beatriz Faria Leao, the system’s health standards patient files denoting HIV status around the
architect, said that this decision was made so that hospital. Colonel F.L. Simapuka, commanding
officer in charge of the hospital’s outpatient
they would not “make the same mistake twice.” services, said that the hospital leadership
believed that an e-first implementation
In contrast to Sao Paulo’s measured approach, would reduce the need for paper records and
rollout in India and Zambia has been either large- therefore would be “a more relevant way of
reducing HIV stigma.”
scale at the outset (India, where the first stage of
rollout was to 18 of 27 Indian states), or is now SmartCare is currently used in voluntary
accelerating (Zambia). In taking these counseling and testing (VCT) and the
approaches, a rollout might miss the opportunity antenatal clinic (ANC), as well as in the
laboratory and pharmacy. Patient
to learn lessons from earlier deployments, or to information is entered by the health care
resolve early implementation issues before rolling professional at the point of service, and
out to additional sites. This is especially important saved onto the patient’s SmartCard.
SmartCare has allowed the hospital to
because the electronic health systems being rolled identify which ART patients are stable and
out are new to many countries, and there are which are not, shifting more stable patients
many lessons that can be learned – and many to nurses and less stable patients to
mistakes avoided – by regularly identifying physicians. SmartCare has also allowed care
providers to check the patient’s medical
problems with implementation and resolving history more easily. This has enabled more
them in rollouts to other regions, districts, or consistent patient care, which has resulted in
sites. There is a distinction, however, between a HIV-related hospital admissions declining by
more than 70% since SmartCare’s
measured, well-planned implementation, and one implementation.
that is slow and over-careful. Even a fast rollout
can systematically integrate and respond to
lessons learned.
Conversely, creating “breathing room” within implementation enables projects to experiment with
novel approaches, or to take the time to think about how to solve difficult problems. As the CDC-
Zambia has transitioned responsibility for site rollout to the Ministry of Health, it has had more time to
identify local “innovators” and to support them as they experiment with SmartCare. The CDC-Zambia

has helped the Zambian National Blood Transfusion Service to develop a SmartCare “SmartDonor”
module to enhance the quality and frequency of voluntary blood donation. It has supported the Maina
Soko Military Hospital (MSMH) in implementing SmartCare, resulting in streamlined HIV patient care
management (see box above), and it has developed a partnership with MachaWorks, a rural NGO that
provides wireless networking in southern Zambia, to provide technical support to SmartCare sites in
southern Zambia.

Next Steps
HIS for health systems serving the poorest parts of the world are still in their infancy. The challenges
are significant, but the need to improve health outcomes is simply too great to ignore the value of
better information to health system performance. Yet, there is still much to be learned and large
projects that fail to live up to expectations will produce growing skepticism, disillusionment and loss of
interest. Solutions advocated by experts in the developed world are often too complex to be practical in
countries where resources and capabilities are severely limited. At the same time, the characteristics of
developing countries are often similar, offering unexploited opportunities to identify common needs
and simple solutions that can lay essential foundations for scalable, sustainable systems. Key enablers of
HIS solutions are foundational to further progress and the ultimate seeding of viable commercial
markets supporting specialized providers and solutions. Guided by these principles, Vital Wave
Consulting sees the following as the most important next steps for furthering HIS development.
1. Drive consensus adoption of a minimum set of essential indicators. As donor,

government, and international organization requirements often play a predominant role in
determining what data is collected, a cross-sector consensus on a minimum set of standard
critical indicators and/or standard reporting requirements would have a profound effect on
reducing the burden of data collection and reporting. There is a notable opportunity to
streamline the frequency and number of data elements collected by health information systems.
Yet although the WHO has made some progress in this area, there is not yet a consensus on a
minimal model set of indicators for individual diseases, such as HIV or tuberculosis. Even
where guidelines are available, they are not routinely adhered to by donors, governments, and
NGOs.51 Forging a consensus around an essential minimum set of standard indicators and
reports required is an area where external donors and multilateral agencies have the strongest
leverage. Alignment is difficult to achieve but is possible when there is a specific and well-
defined outcome desired and strong leadership. There is a two-step process to achieving this
objective:
 Step 1: Identify a minimum set of essential

indicators for critical need areas. Determine Global impact: Consensus adoption
an adequate minimal set of essential indicators of a minimum set of essential
indicators could significantly
that (1) is generally common to different influence the future development of
countries; (2) meets the core needs of health HIS across the developing world. This
systems and funders; and (3) can be specified adoption is valuable whether the
system is:
with sufficient simplicity and clarity so that they • paper-based or electronic
can be readily collected and used by even the • deployed in a least-developed
least developed countries. In particular, a or an upper-middle-income
minimal set of standard indicators for maternal country
• implemented in one city or
health and prevalent communicable diseases is nationwide
urgently needed. Although determining • executed by a private or public
adequacy is a value judgment, a systematic health institution
sampling of indicators and analysis of their
actual use would provide an essential empirical
foundation for a program to begin to drive
consensus among major funders and multilateral organizations.
Page 58 • Next Steps Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009

 Step 2: Promote consensus adoption of the minimum set of essential indicators.
A meaningful worldwide consensus around a comprehensive set of indicators for all
important health data is far off, however, the more modest objective of agreement
around a consensus minimum set, strictly tied to the specific needs of health systems in
developing countries, could be achieved. This is an ambitious goal, but few
achievements would have greater impact.
2. Determine the common, essential information needs across countries. Determine what
essential information needs are common to specific roles in the health system across different
countries and geographies. The strongest incentive for accurate collection and reporting is that
the information is useful to those who collect and report it. To some degree, the information
that is most useful will differ among specific locales, roles, and facilities. The extent to which
there are needs that are common to many places that might serve as a point of departure for
reform efforts still needs to be explored. There is a significant value in comprehensively
analyzing the information that would have the greatest impact on improving patient health
outcomes. This knowledge could be used to guide investment in appropriate hardware,
software, and training solutions and enable greater scale in solution design and implementation.
Additional Recommendations
In addition to the Next Steps listed in the previous section, there are several additional
recommendations for governments and organizations to follow to support effective health information
management in the developing world.
Recommendation: Enhance HIS success rates by supporting initiatives that have high-level
sponsorship and occur in the context of wider health-system reform. HIS initiatives
demonstrating signs of success as diverse as those in Ghana, Rwanda, Sao Paulo, and Belize, have
strong executive sponsorship and occur in the context of health system reforms or other efforts that
provide a clear rationale for HIS investments. In Sao Paulo, the SIGA Saúde system was developed in
2004 under the leadership of several individuals and organizations including Dr. Gonzalo Vecina-Neto
who is Sao Paulo’s Health Secretary, Dr. Antonio Lira who oversaw medical services and health
workers, Lincoln Moura who oversaw all aspects related to the building of the information system and
Prodam, the organization that provided the city’s data processing infrastructure. In addition, the project
enjoyed the strong support of the city’s mayor, Marta Suplicy. Ms. Suplicy aspired to national political
office and had a strong incentive to enable the development of a health information system that would
tangibly and cost-effectively benefit the population while also implementing the recommendations of a
major reform of the Brazilian national health system that had taken place a few years earlier. By
contrast, HIS projects that are not tied to a broader overall reform initiative and lack broad executive
support are vulnerable, especially when they become too closely identified with a single individual.
Recommendation: Support in setting clear priorities for reform. Current HIS assessment tools,
including HMN assessments, highlight the range of problems that health information systems address.
The next step is to provide a clear view of the sequence and magnitude of the issues that must be
addressed. Resources are scarce. Every fault or weakness cannot be addressed at once. It is critical,
therefore, that countries can identify and prioritize the interventions that will produce the highest return
on investment, are most immediately attainable and will have the most direct impact on health

outcomes. Although each country must set its own priorities, it is important for countries to receive
guidance from health informatics experts concerning which components of HIS have the greatest
leverage for initial investment and how to set priorities to optimize scarce resources. Particular attention
should be given to helping countries focus on the core need or problem and to identify the activities
that will enable the country to most effectively address that need. The Value Chain Analysis discussion
in the Appendix offers one possible approach to addressing these questions.
Recommendation: Define HIS needs and goals. Any mention of information systems calls to
mind computers and databases, data centers, and network infrastructure. It is easy to lose sight of the
fact that when HIS projects fail to meet expectations, it is often because needs and goals are not well
defined. In Belize, which maintained a rudimentary HIS before its comprehensive new system was
introduced, health officials and political leaders established the goal of capturing all health encounters
and using the data to manage the health system’s resources. Implementers need the project
management skill and experience to understand the information needs of an organization and how
these needs are aligned to the mission and strategy of the health system. Academics, funders and health-
related NGOs can support the development of needs analysis tools that help governments and other
organizations focus on the core need or challenge.
Recommendation: Streamline data collection. A pattern in many developing countries is that data
is collected on a large number of indicators without clear justification and often with much duplication.
As the case-study section of this report indicates, data collection in Zambia or India may require that
the same piece of data be entered or counted up to four times before it is sent to the district health
information office, where it is entered into the government HIS a final time. Especially for paper-based
systems, simplifying the data collection process offers a very immediate return on investment, at
relatively low cost. This process is also in the best interest of many stakeholders, as reducing the
number of times data is re-entered reduces the opportunity for error and increases the time that
clinicians have available to provide patient care. It may therefore represent a relatively easy opportunity
to improve health information management and subsequently, health outcomes. Similarly, reducing the
amount of unnecessary data collected and reported can dramatically decrease the time spent on data
collection, although this shift does require the agreement of stakeholders that use this data. At least
one academic created a specific set of guidelines to facilitate the data rationalization process.52 No high-
risk investment (or additional investment) in IT is required. Any later commitment to computers and
databases will be far more likely to succeed if these steps are accomplished first.
Recommendation: Develop HIS to support user decision-making. Many health information

systems are structured to provide outputs to the central-level government and to donors. Some health
information systems are structured to speed data entry. Only infrequently are health information
systems designed and implemented to support members of the health system – health care providers,
administrative staff, and management – in making high-quality decisions. There is tremendous potential
to orient HIS initiatives to support improvements in quality of care and decision-making. Parts of the
solution exist today. The Baobab Health Partnership in Malawi provides a console in each consultation
room that clinicians use to enter patient data and to review patient medical history at the touch of a
screen. In Zambia, the CIDRZ ART treatment program provides care to 175,000 clients. CIDRZ uses
patient data to create a quarterly performance report for each facility in its network, works with the
facility to improve care based upon the performance report, and “graduates” facilities that consistently
use data to improve patient care. Continued experimentation with the hardware, software, and training

support is needed to identify the approaches that will help health care professionals do their jobs more
effectively. Television-based video and telemedicine indicate promise and need to be explored further.
Recommendation: Plan for project operations and maintenance at project outset. HIS-reform
budgets need to anticipate and fund the total cost of ownership of HIS solutions. The hidden costs of
technology (technical support, user training, hardware replacement, software upgrades) are often not
taken into account or budgeted. Total cost of ownership (TCO) models offer an essential tool for
planning and budgeting IT projects, a tool that could improve success rates if employed consistently. It
is often assumed that local governments will absorb the costs of ongoing support and maintenance and
recurrent training when there is no commitment or ability to do so. Donors could also explore
alternative models for government counterpart contributions. In lieu of funding equipment up front
and leaving operations to government, donors and government could agree on a cost-sharing
arrangement to be maintained throughout the project lifespan, with the donor contribution contingent
upon the government contribution. Lastly, the likelihood of success of a health-related IT project can
be greatly enhanced by ensuring that the core implementation team is staffed with both health (public
health managers and experts) and IT (IT program managers, business analysts and architects)
professionals.
Recommendation: Invest in adapted technology. Technologies developed for mature markets in

developed countries are not necessarily appropriate for emerging markets. This holds especially for HIS
serving some of the least developed countries, where the standard personal computer is often too
complex and vulnerable for many applications. What is often needed instead is a specially designed
information appliance. In the words of Marcus Achiume, CIO of CIDRZ in Zambia, referring to
technology for an EMR system, “An information terminal should be like a ‘cash register’ for health
information management: no solitaire, no operating system updates, no viruses, and no resale value –
just electronic medical records.” There are good examples of appropriate technology meeting these
kinds of requirements, for example, the touch-screen appliance developed by Baobab Health
Partnership in Malawi. There is significant need for further investment in these types of technologies
and, most important, to develop markets of sufficient size to permit economies of scale to reduce costs.
Donors can play a significant role by investing in appropriate research and development and promoting
best practices in design and adoption of appropriate solutions. Seed funding, awards, and prizes are also
well-established mechanisms to stimulate innovation and bring widespread attention to significant
achievements.
Recommendation: Develop commercial markets. The market for HIS technology and services in
developing countries is nascent. The customers are primarily donors; the products and services are
custom consulting or design-build contracts. Costs are high. Economies of scale are largely absent.
Needs are often unclear, which makes product development difficult. The market, though potentially
large, is currently very small. Major commercial enterprises find that the risks of developing technology
for this market are too great to justify the investment. Interventions that reduce risks and barriers to
entry can help to expand the commercial marketplace for health technology and services in developing
countries. Standards can play a crucial role by reducing risks and costs for technology providers. At a
system level, it is necessary to understand existing barriers to entry and the financial value associated
with reducing these barriers, to effectively drive market growth in new markets. Value chain analysis,
described further in the Appendix of this report, is a methodology designed specifically to perform this
type of market analysis.

Recommendation: Increase project accountability by changing the structure of provider
contracts. Current funding models reward project implementers for successful completion of
contracted projects but contain few incentives for assuring the long-term viability of projects,
particularly of technology investments. Contracts may specify that there be a plan for monitoring and
evaluation, but the plan lasts only as long as the project is underway. Whether a project has an impact
or lasts beyond the implementation phase is not documented or assessed. There is great value and an
opportunity for post-implementation assessments, perhaps accompanied by a system of bonuses for
contractors, if systems continue to function and be used productively long after the initial installation.
Recommendation: Invest in increasing the attractiveness of the HIS technology and services
market. The HIS technology and services “market” in developing countries is characterized by lack of
clear definition of product needs, high costs associated with the absence of economies of scale, and
potentially low margins due to ceilings on donor funding. There are often multiple clients, in the form
of multiple stakeholders, and the operating environment is typically unfamiliar to top-tier providers of
HIS technology and services. In addition to the development of standards, there is a need to support
the creation of partnerships between top-tier IT corporations, which have a core competency in areas
such as complex program and change management, database and application design and local IT firms
who are more equipped to do the field support (supporting rural clinics and health posts). The local
company receives mentoring and capacity building while the larger company gains expertise, and
potentially other projects, in e-government work. Another approach would be to encourage the
development of “re-usable components” which are hardware or software designs and modules that can
be leveraged across HIS projects in multiple countries.
Next Steps:
• Drive consensus adoption of a minimum set of essential indicators

• Determine the common, essential information needs across countries
Additional Recommendations:
• Enhance HIS success rates by supporting initiatives that have high-level

sponsorship and occur in the context of wider health-system reform
• Support in setting clear priorities for reform
• Define HIS needs and goals
• Streamline data collection
• Develop HIS to support user decision-making
• Plan for project operations and maintenance at project outset
• Invest in adapted technology
• Develop commercial markets
• Increase project accountability by changing the structure of provider contracts
• Invest in increasing the attractiveness of the HIS technology and services market

Country HIS Scans
Bangladesh
The Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh is
Country: Bangladesh formally committed to providing basic health services to its
population. Since 1998, the Health and Population Sector
Strategy has been the main pillar of the National Health Policy.
GNI per capita (2007): $393 The strategy’s main principles are integrated into the current
Health, Nutrition and Population Sector Program (HNPSP) 2003-
Acute Health Challenges: 2010, which is implemented by the Bangladesh Ministry of
Very high child and maternal Health and Family Welfare (MOHFW).53 The “Health for All”
mortality; risk of an HIV/AIDS
epidemic; world’s fifth highest
campaign and the delivery of the Essential Services Package
rate of tuberculosis (TB) and its (ESP), with its emphasis on Primary Healthcare (PHC) at the
multi-drug resistant form; upazila (sub-district) level, are among the top priorities of the
prevalence of malaria and polio National Health Policy.54 ESP covers services in four main
recurrence; highest malnutrition
levels in the world, including
categories: child health, reproductive health, communicable
childhood protein-energy disease control and limited curative care.55 Bangladesh pledged
deficiency; maternal malnutrition to meet the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals
(MDGs) by 2015, in part by pursuing a decentralized policy of
Major Health Sector health development, meaning that local community
Initiatives: Health, Nutrition
and Population Sector Program
organizations, NGOs and various aid donors would take a
(HNPSP), 2003-2010, with greater role in improving health delivery outcomes.
emphasis on primary care in child
and reproductive health and Under the new HNPSP 2003-2010 Operational Plan, the
infectious diseases parameters of electronic health activities are laid out. However,
HIS Initiatives: Joint project
there is limited knowledge or understanding about the status
with Health Metrics Network to of the HMIS. The MOHFW is currently engaged in a joint
evaluate HIS project with the WHO Health Metrics Network to evaluate the
HMIS and to develop practical solutions for future HIS in
HIS Type: Primarily manual data Bangladesh.
collection and paper records,
with isolated cases of electronic
records and a few telemedicine In the MOHFW, the Line Director of MIS (Health) is
and mobile health initiatives responsible for e-health implementation (health and
population activities are divided into “lines” or “sectors”). The
HIS Category: Group 1 Line Director of MIS (Health) “is responsible for (a) the
collection and exchange of health service data across all service
delivery points, health managers at different tiers, and officials
at MOHFW to support monitoring of progress of health programs and policy decisions; (b) conducting
annual household survey personnel, logistic and financial MIS; (c) telemedicine; and (d) e-records,
etc.”56 The current HMIS functions inadequately, as do information support and data usage. Internet-
enabled computers are available at “the MOHFW, central store for medical supplies (national level), all
national and regional tertiary hospitals, 64 district health centers and most of the 464 sub-district
hospitals.”57 Hospital data is collected locally, with minimal processing and analysis. Field health
workers gather household-based data, accumulate it at sub-district health centers and forward it to the
MIS headquarters in Dhaka. The human resources database is used for placement purposes for the
Page 63 • Country HIS Scans Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009

Health Services staff, whereas the finance and logistics components of the HMIS are still under
development.58
Bangladesh is using some innovative technological approaches to solve local health problems and
achieve better health outcomes in the country. For instance, the City Corporation of Bangladesh
(Rajshahi) developed an Electronic Birth Registration System (EBRS) that provides local citizens with a
personal electronic identification card. Citizens now have an incentive to register births because the
card is required to access local services, such as immunization schedules and school enrollment. This
new system enables health authorities to reliably track each child’s immunization history, replacing a
disorganized manual system, and effectively provides data to accurately monitor progress and for
national decision-making.59
The Integrated Rural Health Information System (IRHIS) is leveraging a model developed in the
microfinance industry to develop a rural health insurance network that will link 64 private and 64 public
health facilities in rural areas.60 At least two mobile health
initiatives are underway, namely D.Net (Development HIS Strengths: Line Director of
Research Network), an NGO using a mobile health worker MIS (health) position has clear
and outreach to provide around-the-clock mobile health authority to develop and
services to rural residents, and 24-hour medical advice over implement information strategy
the phone, delivered by a partnership between
HIS Weaknesses: Lack of ICT
GrameenPhone and Telenor, two mobile communications literate staff and scarce financial
service providers. There are telemedicine projects run by the resources limit computer
Diabetic Association of Bangladesh (in pilot mode) and purchases and maintenance and
MEDINOVA, a diagnostic clinic that connects to overseas recruitment of ICT staff; poor
record-keeping; poor and
doctors. expensive ICT connectivity
Despite the success with paperless medical records at the Critical HIS Challenges: Huge
privately-owned Apollo Hospitals Dhaka (AHD), the patient-loads leave little time for
prospect of widespread usage of electronic records for electronic record maintenance;
concept of the e-health
individual patients in public hospitals remains dim, primarily framework (data need, hardware,
due to a constant influx of patients, shortage of medical staff software, analysis technique,
and lack of ICT resources. 61 Out-patient service is particularly transmission, utilization, etc.)
challenging because doctors have, at best, five minutes to needs strengthening
spend with each patient.62

Belize
With only 300,000 people covering an area roughly the size of
Country: Belize Massachusetts, Belize is smaller than many of the developing
world’s cities, let alone its countries. Although Belize had a very
Population: 300,000
rudimentary, paper-based health information system as recently
GNI per capita (2007): $3,800 as 2004, today it has perhaps the most comprehensive
nationwide HIS in the world, the Belize Health Information
Acute Health Challenges: System (BHIS).
Heart and respiratory diseases,
malaria, infant and maternal In 2001, Belize embarked on a comprehensive reform of its
mortality
health sector, aimed at modernizing the overall structure,
Major Health Sector providing greater coverage for the population and improving
Initiatives: A national health operational efficiency. The BHIS became part of this
insurance scheme, with the comprehensive overhaul when planning for it began in 2004.
government becoming a single The government of Belize contracted with Canadian software
payer in a more decentralized
health system; comprehensive developer Accesstec, with financial and technical assistance
health sector reform from the Inter American Development Bank (IADB) and the
Pan American Health Organization, to develop a health
HIS Initiatives: Belize Health information system that tracked all patient encounters with the
Information Services, which
captures over 80% of health
health system while managing patient flow, monitoring
encounters nationally, in infectious disease outbreaks and keeping track of supply
personal electronic health inventories and financial and human resources.
records; other modules track
patient flow, inventories, lab At the heart of the Belize HIS is a personal Electronic Health
results, and financial and human
resource management
Record, which is provided for all citizens and which contains
comprehensive medical background, treatment history, and
HIS Type: Automated, EMR- health status records. The benefits of the system, according to
based system the Ministry of Health, include “better tracking and monitoring
of infectious diseases such as SARS and Bird-Flu, rapid
HIS Category: Group 4
identification of patients in the event of the release of unsafe
medicines, country-wide prevention of mother to child
transmission of HIV and better care for diabetics.”63
The module-based system captures the vast majority of individual encounters with the health care
system by linking the Ministry of Health with the country’s health facilities. The goal is an integrated
resource management tool that integrates all aspects of the health system, where the various
components are able to communicate concerning needs and possible actions, replacing siloed or
disease-specific systems. Patient-flow, laboratory, pharmacy, HIV/AIDS and human resource
management modules comprise the system and are designed to interact with each other.
Although the system is proprietary, it is Java-based and open source components are embedded within
it, which allows it to run on any operating system. The licensing scheme is perpetual one-time license,
and the system has replication technology that allows it to operate without any network connectivity, a
critical component for infrastructure-challenged environments.64

The system has been operational in Belize since 2004 (it was also deployed to St. Lucia in 2007), and
Accesstec claims that the system can scale to accommodate up to 100 million health records. Nearly
90% of the users have been trained in operating the BHIS. The system has also integrated
pharmaceutical tracking by connecting every pharmaceutical warehouse in Belize to the system, in
addition to 22 private pharmaceutical suppliers.65
In September 2008, the country signed a memorandum of understanding with the Health Metrics
Network (HMN), which will allow the Ministry of Health to access resources enabling the BHIS to
meet the global standards designed by the HMN.66 The BHIS is already being touted as a success and
may serve as a model for other developing countries, though
specific health outcomes resulting from the HIS HIS Strengths: Integrates the
implementation will likely not be available for several years. entire health sector of Belize,
including patient flow, supply
The Belize HIS represents perhaps the most comprehensive management and patient
electronic medical records and
national HIS initiative currently in place, but the lessons that establishes the Ministry of Health
can be drawn from it must be considered in the context of as the central repository for
Belize’s small size and the lack of entrenched legacy systems, health data
which obviate the need to integrate disparate technologies
and the bureaucratic structures attached to them. It also must HIS Weaknesses: Trained
health personnel are
be viewed in the context of a comprehensive health sector concentrated in the metropolitan
reform and new national health insurance scheme. As in areas of Belize, meaning some
other prominent HIS developments, such as Sao Paulo’s, patient encounters take place
systems often seem likelier to achieve success when they outside the formal sector
occur alongside a wholesale reform of a health system’s Critical HIS Challenges:
structure and functioning, rather than when they are built to Ensure inclusion of all citizens in
accommodate an existing system whose dysfunctionality may formal health sector in order to
preclude attempts to capture and integrate important data. capture maximum data

China
Since the beginning of market reforms and economic
Country: China liberalization in the early 1980s, China’s health sector has
witnessed a drastic transformation of its landscape. The result
Population: 1.3 billion
has been a fiscal decentralization of health services to the
GNI per capita (2007): $2,360 lowest administrative levels, as well as inequalities between
more and less developed areas. In order to address these
Health Challenges: disparities, the Chinese government is pursuing ICT
Communicable diseases and development policies in the health sector, with the desire to
malnutrition, especially in less
developed areas and among
electronically connect “health administration departments and
children; high infant and under- hospitals as well as medical education and research institutes.”67
five mortality rates where access
to health services is low; In 2002, China’s Ministry of Health (MOH) introduced the
HIV/AIDS, SARS and avian 2003—2010 Guidelines for Development of National Health
influenza; smoking-related
diseases.
Informatics.68 The Guidelines establish regional health
information systems across China by 2010 and emphasize the
Major Health Sector principle of standardization in an effort to improve
Initiatives: New Cooperative information sharing and interoperability. Subsequently, the
Medical Scheme (NCMS) MOH chose the city of Shenzhen as a pilot site for the
implemented in rural areas and
community health services development of these regional health information systems. In
development. addition, the MOH has proposed the development of basic
infrastructure for hospital information systems, particularly
HIS Initiatives: 2003–2010 Chinese traditional medicine information systems.
Ministry of Health Guidelines for
HIT development call for the
introduction of electronic medical
The use of health information systems is dominated by
records and regional health hospitals,69 with most of the systems focused on financial and
information networks throughout administrative functions.70 According to a recent study, patient-
the country centered systems represent only about 10% of all hospital-
based HIS.71 Roughly 70% of hospitals at the county level or
HIS Type: Automated systems
mostly in hospitals above have implemented an HIS.72 Regional health information
systems and ICT procurements for public hospitals are
HIS Category: Group 3 financed by provincial and local governments. While the MOH
is responsible for adopting new standards and developing IT
infrastructure, hospitals finance new clinical and institutional
IT systems from their own funds. The development of hospital
information systems in China has been somewhat uneven, due to problems such as a lack of standard
approaches to hospital management and weak software development.73 Due to inexperience in IT,
hospitals now have fragmented, duplicate systems, and poor integration between those systems, leading
to “silo” systems that make data sharing difficult.
Prompted by the SARS outbreak in 2003, China developed a Web-based disease surveillance system
that provides real-time reports on 37 diseases across the country74 and is reportedly the largest
infectious disease reporting system in the world.75 The system has GIS mapping features that assist in
identifying case clusters and early detection of potential outbreaks. The system covers both China’s
Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the government’s public health administration, which operate in
parallel – and with equal influence and authority – at the county (district), municipal (prefecture),

provincial and central (national) levels (see Figure 1 at the end of this country scan).76 Improved data
accuracy and timeliness, earlier detection and containment of outbreaks and more accurate data on
disease prevalence are just a few of the benefits the system is producing. Prior to 1985, the government
relied on paper-based monthly reports. From 1985—2003, China moved to digital monthly reports, and
in 2004, the Web-based system became operational.
In addition to the disease surveillance system, China’s HIS has other subsystems, including the Routine
Health Statistic Information System (RHSIS), which contains information and
data on health facilities, human resources, equipment and

services provided to patients; the National Household Health HIS Strengths: Established
Services Survey (NHHSS); the Maternal and Child Healthcare organizational and administrative
government structure, high
Surveillance System; and the Health Supervision Information
adoption of IT by hospitals,
System (HSIS), which contains information on food, public effective disease surveillance
facilities, schools and the environment.77 system
Computers, the Internet and email access are generally HIS Weaknesses: Redundant,
available throughout most of the country, except in the fragmented systems lead to
increased burden for data
western parts of China, particularly at the county level.78 providers
However, at the provincial level, especially in the western
regions of China and poor areas, there can be a shortage of Critical HIS Challenges: Poor
full-time HIS staff, as well as insufficient capacity in core infrastructure in western region,
lack of human capacity and
health disciplines, such as epidemiology, demography and
skilled IT professionals
statistics. The health sector also loses HIS staff to the private
sector, where companies can offer better salaries.79

Ethiopia
Since 1993, Ethiopia has been pursuing a national health policy
Country: Ethiopia advocating the decentralization of the health care sector, with a
major focus on community level services. In order to make
health services available to the local population, in 2004 the
GNI per capita (2007): $220 Ethiopian government adopted an Essential Health Service
Package (EHSP) through the previously created Health Service
Acute Health Challenges: Extension Program (HSEP) in 2004.80 The EHSP aims to provide
Child and maternal mortality equal access to essential health services and covers five major
rates among the highest in the
world; infectious diseases (HIV, health interventions: Family Health Services, Communicable
TB, malaria, child diarrhea and Disease Prevention and Control Services, Hygiene and
intestinal parasites) Environmental Health Services, Health Education and
Communication Services, Basic Curative Care and Treatment
Major Health Sector
Initiatives: Health Sector
of Major Chronic Conditions.81
Development Program (HSDP), in
its third five-year phase Ethiopia is working toward fulfilling a comprehensive 20-year
program, the Health Sector Development Program (HSDP). The
HIS Initiatives: HIS evaluation HSDP timeline is broken into five-year phases, and is currently
and redesign to improve the in its third five-year phase (2005/06 through 2009/10). The
country’s paper-based system,
with aim of eventually converting third 5-year phase of HSDP seeks to end poverty and meet the
to electronic system Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). In addition, the
current HSDP attempts to “strengthen the health management
HIS Type: Paper–based, information system [HMIS]” in Ethiopia, which, in general
traditional district health
indicators
terms, represents a “combination of health services-based data
sources”. 82
The Ethiopian HMIS is implemented by the Federal Ministry
of Health (FMOH). Meanwhile, the Central Statistical Agency
(CSA), a division of the Ethiopian government, manages
“population –based health information sources” - censuses, ad hoc surveys, and registering vital events.
The HMIS was established to “support informed strategic decision-making by providing quality data
that help managers and health workers plan and manage the health service system.” 83
In an effort to improve the performance of the HMIS, Ethiopia contracted with the consulting firm
John Snow, Inc. (JSI) in 2006 to perform an evaluation and redesign of the HMIS. As the HMIS is
predominantly paper-based, this project was to culminate in the design and deployment of an electronic
HIS, following reform and revision of the existing paper-based system. As of 2008, a comprehensive
electronic HMIS has been developed in conjunction with doctors associated with Tulane University and
is now being deployed to health facilities in several regions of the country, with an eventual nationwide
rollout eventually slated to occur.
In addition to the 2006 reform of the HMIS, Ethiopia completed an assessment of the HMIS under the
auspices of the Health Metrics Network HMN in 2007. This assessment found the HMIS to be
“cumbersome and fragmented.” Among the major HMIS challenges and weaknesses were the absence
of an implementation strategy and guidelines; the shortage of human resources and high staff turnover;
inadequate skills for gathering and analyzing data among health care staff at lower levels; unsatisfactory

quality of data in the reports, resulting in a compromised ability to make informed decisions;
fragmented information flow, including parallel reporting system channels causing increased
workload.84 It would appear from the HMN assessment that the 2006 reform of the HIS, while perhaps
effective to some degree, did not address all issues necessary for an effective national HIS. The 2006
reform addressed only minimal changes to routine practices in
the health system, namely, reduction of indicators and redesign
HIS Strengths: Existing paper-
of forms. However, the reform failed to encourage behavioral based system reformed and
changes amongst managers and administrators in the HMIS, a improved prior to conversion to
result that would have required substantially more resources and electronic systems
a more coordinated effort.
HIS Weaknesses: Data
collection problems remain and
More recently, Ethiopia has seen a significant deployment of the data quality is still in need of
SmartCare system used in Zambia. Over 100 clinics and improvement
hospitals in the Dire Dawa region, covering the entire area, have
successfully deployed this system for building and maintaining Critical HIS Challenges:
Rollout of HIS reforms hindered
electronic medical records, which will improve both the quality
by lack of human resources and
of health information as well as patient care. training

Ghana
Over the past decades Ghana has undergone various health
Country: Ghana sector reforms which are aimed at stopping the deterioration
of health service delivery caused by the severe economic
Population: 22 million
decline of the late 1970s. 85 These reforms were shaped by the
GNI per capita (2007): $590 institutional restructuring and reorganization of the Ministry of
Health (MOH) to move toward decentralized planning and
Acute Health Challenges: management of health care at the national level, while
High child and maternal delegating more functional authority to Regional and District
mortality, infectious diseases
(malaria, TB, HIV, child diarrhea)
Health Services in managing their own health delivery
activities.86 A key part of these reforms during the current
Major Health Sector decade is the launch of a national health insurance scheme,
Initiatives: National Health which has in turn created the need to develop better health
Insurance Scheme (NHIS) begun information systems.
in 2004 to cover the entire
population with access to basic
health services. Coverage now Since 2005 Ghana has effectively implemented the National
reaches 55% of population Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) in all country districts. The
NHIS strives to cover the entire population with equal
HIS Initiatives: District-wide universal access to the basic health services package. It is
Health Information Management
System (DHIMS), launched in
subsidized by the National Health Insurance Fund for
2007, to improve use and covering workers, their dependents and the elderly. The NHIS
analysis of health data for witnessed a significant coverage increase from 38% of the
decision-making at service Ghana’s population at the end of 2006 to 55% by the end of
provision level
2007. 87 Despite this success, the NHIS has struggled to
HIS Type: Automated data overcome several major problems, including administrative
collection system at district level delays, defining and effectively targeting poor people and a
lack of adequate equipment and trained staff.
HIS Category: DHIMS an
attempt to move from Group 1 to In parallel with the NHIS implementation, the MOH initiated
Group 3 or 4
various programs to strengthen its inadequate health
information system (HIS). One of them was a design for an
integrated health management information system that promotes better data usage at all levels,
including analysis of data at the point of collection and health data action driven decision making
process and reporting. 88 In 2007 MOH’s Ghana Health Service (GHS) launched its automated system,
called the District-wide Health Information Management System (DHIMS).
The DHIMS has been developed for use at districts in order to improve the use of health data for
decision making at the level where data is produced. It is claimed that the system captures the data in
the districts from “the community and public health services to the district hospitals”89 and provides
support for hospital integration of electronic patient records, billing and hospital management system.90
The DHIMS attained full country coverage in 2007 after original piloting in 20 districts across the
country.91 Data flows are vertical, with accumulated data from health facilities in districts flowing to the
regional and national levels. The GHS has expressed plans to extend it to the sub-districts where
untapped capacity for data entry is present. 92 Several achievements have been made, such as the
electronic storage and transmission of data at the national and regional level. Uninterrupted electricity
flow in most of Ghana minimizes system disruption. Yet the DHIMS has faced numerous challenges,

such as a lack of qualified information officers in many districts’ HIS Strengths: Electronic data
hospitals, inadequate funding which caused the delay of system storage and transmission
deployment in some districts, and insufficient availability of capacity, uninterrupted electricity
infrastructure equipment (e.g., computers) especially at the district generation for equipment use
level.93
HIS Weaknesses: Inconsistent
information requirements, lack of
While the DHIMS implementation is relatively recent, a 2006 HMN qualified information officers in
assessment report of Ghana's health information system identified many district hospitals,
the need for major improvements in the way the nation’s health inadequate funding for
deployment and poor equipment
system collects and uses data.94 The MoH and GHS were cited as
availability at the district level
having different information needs, which created unclear data
flows and areas of responsibility. Other areas of weakness included Critical HIS Challenges:
the lack of a central data warehouse, a “data driven” orientation Improve staffing skill levels, align
instead of an “action driven” one and a lack of qualified data and information collection with facility
and national needs
statistical staff at the local and national level.

Haiti
The political and economic instability that has characterized
Country: Haiti Haiti virtually from its founding has had a profoundly negative
impact on the country’s health system, resulting in a highly
inadequate public health care infrastructure.95 In an effort to
GNI per capita (2007): $560 improve the situation, the Haitian Ministry of Public Health and
Population (MPHP) has embarked on a path of health sector
Acute Health Challenges: The reforms, pursuing a health policy with a focus on decentralized
highest incidence of HIV/AIDS Community Health Units (CHU) that integrate community
outside of Africa; infectious
intestinal diseases (diarrhea,
participation in local health facilities and provide health services
infectious gastroenteritis, under the Basic Package of Services (BPS). Currently, MPHP is
typhoid); poor nutrition, guided by the National Strategic Plan (NSP) for health sector
unsanitary conditions, and reform to be implemented in 2003–2008.96
overall inadequate state health
service provision
As of 2003, Haiti’s health system had neither a public nor a
Major Health Sector private agency responsible for health technology assessment,
Initiatives: National Strategic and lacked appropriate policies in that area.97 Hence, the
Plan for health sector reform aforementioned National Strategic Plan for health sector reform
formally calls for the modernization of the country’s health
HIS Initiatives: NSP mandates
modernization of HIS and
information system (HIS). It explicitly defines the major
contains standards for features of HIS for the BPS at the primary level, which is
development of tools that would subdivided into two tiers with distinctive “tools for
allow tracking of records and management of each patient, the institution’s management tools
resource management; EMR in
Partners in Health and PEPFAR
and system tools.”98 These types of tools would allow health
programs track ARV treatment care staff to collect and maintain medical data on each patient
for tens of thousands of patients with health cards for women and children, individual medical
files, and birth certificates, among other forms of information.
HIS Type: Functioning HIS They also allow administrators to verify onsite control of
restricted primarily to HIV-
related programs
monitoring and evaluation operations at health facilities, such as
records on BPS activities, supply of drugs and vaccines,
HIS Category: Group 1, outside inventory books for medical and non-medical equipment, files
of privately-funded HIS on medical personnel containing individual work description
cards, and maintenance logs. Finally, these tools allow officials
to manage data on reporting and communication with the CHU
through the use of referral/counter-referral cards, regular reports on diseases, and monitoring books on
community activities. Under the BPS, basic health services facilities, called Health Centers, offer First
Tier Level Health Services (FTHS), including preventive and curative care and promotional services;
the second tier is represented by the first resort Community Reference Hospitals (CRHs) in the CHUs
which treat patients referred by the first tier health centers or communal health workers.
Unfortunately, the implementation of health strategy activities including HIS in Haiti is hindered by the
substandard legal system and other inadequate institutions. This precarious situation is characterized as
“a state of anarchy in which the Government is unable to regulate, direct, or monitor the quality of
services and supplies provided.”99 Despite what seems a well-ordered plan to improve data collection
and analysis, it is difficult to make a qualitative assessment of a national health information system in
Haiti.

The general decay of the Haitian public health system has meant that the private sector and non-profit
organizations have had to step in to provide services, and several of these have developed functioning,
automated HIS. For instance, the Clinical Informatics Research Group (CIRG) at the University of
Washington worked with International Training and Education Center on HIV (I-TECH) to develop
the Networked Electronic Medical Record System, which facilitates service provision for “both
individual and population health care of HIV-infected patients in Haiti”100 and which has been financed
by the US-sponsored President's Emergency Plan for AIDS
Relief (PEPFAR). The Networked Electronic Medical
HIS Strengths: Several well-
Record System is used to provide anti-retroviral treatment, funded HIV-related NGOs have
and tracks the records of approximately 18,600 patients with developed working EMR-based
a hybrid paper-electronic workflow architecture deployed on HIS for ARV treatment
Microsoft SQL Server (WISP). The developed electronic
medical record (EMR) system was originally piloted in April HIS Weaknesses: General
disorganization of the Haitian
2005 by a single hospital in Port au Prince, Haiti, and was health system; severe
101
projected to reach 86 sites by September 2008. Partners in infrastructure deficiencies
Health (PIH) has also developed the HIV-EMR system in
Haiti, based on its own EMR architecture, which it has used Critical HIS Challenges: The
in other countries, including Peru, Rwanda, and Malawi. The general disarray of the health
system means that privately-
HIV-EMR not only contains patient records pertaining to developed HIS will likely have to
HIV treatment, it also maintains a web-based system for fill the void left by public health
tracking clinic drug supplies. Access is via satellite Internet incapacity
and data entry is possible even while disconnected from the
Internet.102

Indonesia
Since 2001, Indonesia has been implementing a steady
Country: Indonesia decentralization of its health sector, empowering the
implementation of health service delivery programs at the
Population (2006): 229 million
district level while at the national level providing policy
GNI per capita (2007): $1,650 guidance, introducing standards, and conducting epidemic
surveillance.103 The “Healthy Indonesia 2010” program of the
Health Challenges: High child Indonesian Ministry of Health and Social Welfare commits the
mortality caused by acute government to the goal of protecting the health of each
respiratory infections, diarrhea,
malaria and malnutrition; high Indonesian and facilitating the affordability of health services.
maternal mortality; continued
high prevalence of HIV, malaria In order to improve the provision of health services to poor
and TB people, the Ministry of Health (MoH) initiated the Askeskin
Insurance Program in 2005 (now known as Jamkesmas).104
Major Health Sector
Initiatives: Jamkesmas
Under this scheme, the poor are entitled to free health care at
insurance program, which public health clinics (Puskesmas) and free inpatient treatment
extends individual-based health in third-class public hospital wards. Over 60 million
coverage to the poor with the Indonesians currently rely on these services. The Askeskin
goal of decreasing catastrophic
health expenditures
Insurance Program represented a shift from previous health
card programs in that it targets individuals while previous
HIS Initiatives: Online National programs have targeted households, and the Askeskin
Health Information System, insurance cards contain photographs for ID verification. 105
which rationalizes existing
reporting structure and builds The National Health Information System (NHIS) in Indonesia
data and Internet infrastructure
to support online; local district is structured vertically, with central, provincial, district, and
health information pilots village levels. At the village level, health centers collect data
from local facilities, including integrated health service posts
HIS Type: Moving from manual, and midwife homes or clinics. Routine health data (e.g., birth
aggregate-based data reporting
to records-based automated
registration, immunization, mortality, etc.) is accumulated at the
system district level, where it is combined with other health data from
public and private hospitals (primarily based on outpatient and
HIS Category: Currently in inpatient records). At the district level, the routine health data
Group 1, online NHIS would is reported to the province-level health offices and then flows
move to Group 3 with some
Group 4 elements
all the way up to “the Center of Health Data and Information
(PusDatIn) at the central level.” 106 Mostly data analysis is done
at the district health office, though a few health centers at
village level are capable as well. The results are reported once a year. The same time frequency for
analyzing data is used by the district hospitals in their own hospital reports.
Because of changes caused by the health system decentralization, the NHIS has experienced problems
in gathering data at provincial and central levels, specifically with routine data entry and reporting
functions. It appears that at the lower levels much more data exists, and it is often not finding its way to
the provincial and central levels. WHO’s office in Indonesia reports that as a result of this, there is little
data available that reflects the health status of the country as a whole. This lack of information puts
pressure on the entire system, causing difficulties in planning and implementing health programs at
lower structural levels, especially within the districts. 107 Other constraints and challenges include

existence of multilayered reporting systems in HIS for different program purposes, inadequate data
usage for management purposes use and decision making by the community, high level of absenteeism
among health workers, low availability of statistics from the private sector (due to complications with
incorporating data from private sector providers and NGOs; this is an especially serious problem
because most health services are performed by the private institutions), and chronic underfunding for
ICT and equipment.
In response to these shortcomings, the MoH released Decree No. 837 for the “Development of Online
National HIS” in 2007. The decree sets out to establish a more rational, coordinated approach for two-
way information flow, with the goal of reaching Target 14 of Grand Strategy 3, “the functioning of
evidence-based health information system throughout Indonesia”.108 The process involved in reaching
this goal entails building the data banks and Internet infrastructure to aggregate and transmit patient
and resource records from health facilities to district, province, and national-level offices. Responsibility
for building this infrastructure is shared between different levels of government, and progressive goals
are set until a fully built national online HIS connects all hospitals and district offices to the provincial
and national centers.109
One successful case study on implementing an open source application for district health information
systems (DHIS) development is the Wonosobo district in Central Java province. In 2006, the district,
with a population of over 700,000, started to develop a
HIS Strengths: Online NHIS
wireless wide area network DHIS connecting 21 Primary represents MoH commitment and
Health Centers (PHC) and the District Health Office (DHO). plan to move from inadequate
The open source DHIS software was deployed in the DHO data reporting to ICT-enabled
and the PHCs. Every PHC provided two computers to run transmission of health data
web-based applications to support community health activities,
HIS Weaknesses: Inadequate
including patient electronic medical records, while at the DHO funding for ICT, exclusion from
a similar web-based application was introduced. The DHO’s HIS of private providers, multiple
software application is used to incorporate data reports from layers and standards for
the PHCs, based on data conversion inputs creating maps, reporting requirements
charts and tables, and vertical reports. PHP 5.1 and AJAX Critical HIS Challenges:
were used to develop the DHO’s application that is supported Improve technical capacity at
by mySQL 5.0.23 database. 110 The project has met with lower levels in order to leverage
success thus far, providing a more integrated view of the newly built infrastructure and
include private health providers
health indicators across the population while still allowing for
individual medical records.

Kenya
Kenya has a long history of health sector reform. In 1972 the
Country: Kenya Ministry of Health, WHO, Central Bureau of Statistics and the
Attorney General Chambers formed a committee to design a
health information system (HIS) for Kenya. In 1984, the
GNI per capita (2007): $680 Ministry of Health established health information systems
offices in each district, thereby decentralizing its reporting
Acute Health Challenges: activities and making the districts responsible for processing
Malaria, respiratory disease, health data from all health facilities. With Kenya’s National
HIV/AIDS, high infant and
maternal mortality Health Sector Strategic Plan (1999 – 2004), the ministry laid
out strategies to improve coordination with the private sector
Major Health Sector and NGOs and recognized the need for integrated health
Initiatives: The Kenya Essential information systems.111
Package for Health (KEPH)
shifted the approach from service
delivery and disease burden to
The private sector and FBOs/NGOs play a large role in
promoting healthy lifestyles delivering health care in Kenya, but this role is decreasing with
throughout the human life cycle the investment of government funds in the construction of
health facilities. The ministry’s HMIS report from 2006 stated
HIS Initiatives: AMPATH, that 59% of health care delivery was by the private sector,
numerous donor programs,
projects using the PDA and NGOs, and FBOs.112 By the end of 2007 the numbers
mobile phone as the data reversed: the government managed 58%.113 Hospitals, which
collection or delivery channel make up just 7% of all health facilities, employ the majority of
health workers and care for the majority of patients.114 Other
HIS Type: Manual, paper-based
at lower levels, computer system
health facilities include “health centers, dispensaries and
at national level specialized clinics for physicians, dentists, and other health
practitioners.”115
More investment is needed in health infrastructure to address
the urban-rural divide and regional variability as well as the
shortage of health workers. In 2000, there was only one doctor for 10,150 people and in 2007 the
situation worsened, with the ratio declining to one doctor per 16,000 people.116
The goal of HIS stated in the Annual Health Sector Status Report for 2005-2007 is “to generate and use
health information for policy formulation, management, planning, budgeting, implementation,
monitoring and evaluation of health services and programme interventions in the health sector.”117
However, Kenya’s HMIS is not delivering on this goal. The information systems at the central
(ministry) level are stand-alone and therefore focused on a specific vertical function. The provincial and
district level systems, which provide data to centrally managed health service units and hospitals at their
respective levels, are also fragmented.118
Kenya’s HMIS systems have historically supported epidemiological data, explaining the lack of other
subsystems of a comprehensive HMIS, such as drugs, lab services, logistics, finance, and human
resources. There are many vertical programs creating their own program-specific databases which are
not integrated with the national HIS. The national HIS is based on a computer system called
CLARION.119

Donor Type of Assistance
UNICEF Data collection for the Expanded Program on Immunization (EPI).
WHO, World Bank,

Surveillance of communicable diseases through the IDSR strategy
CDC
Health Sector Programme Support (HSPS Danida) is rolling out an automated Integrated
Danida (Government
District Health Management Information System and supporting coordination by the National
of Denmark)
HMIS
PEPFAR, Clinton
Payment of salaries for key HIS staff in each district
Foundation
Service Availability Mapping (SAM) initial exercise in 2004 (but no guarantee of support to
WHO
update the database)
USAID National Health Accounts assessment survey (May – September 2007)
European Union HMIS in two provinces (Eastern and Central) through a Health Sector Support Project (HSSP).
Table 5 – Donor and Type of Assistance
Each district has at least two health records and information officers and one disease surveillance
officer, responsible for collecting data at the district level. Most districts have computers but do not
have a database for data entry and analysis of indicators. Within the 78 health districts of Kenya are 234
hospitals and 5,170 peripheral health facilities (peripheral health units or PHUs). These officers perform
routine health data collection but are hampered by a number of problems. The HIS Assessment reports
that “Data collection registers are often improvised at the PHUs and reporting forms are not always
available at all PHUs for monthly reporting of morbidity data and other health statistics.”120 It is a one-
way data flow, so PHUs lack the incentive to completely and accurately collect and report the data. The
end result is poor data quality in all respects and thus the data is not used.121 Reporting rates are below
60%, partly due to the lack of a written policy regarding
reporting compliance and enforcement.122 Causes can be as HIS Strengths: Information
simple as the lack of self-addressed envelopes to inadequate officers are available at the
reporting forms. Some provinces did not report for an entire district level; recognition of need
year.123 for HIS policies and guidelines;
harmonized list of health
indicators have been developed
The list of donors and programs assisting with some aspect of
HIS development is long, but these programs represent an HIS Weaknesses: Fragmented
uncoordinated and piecemeal approach rather than forming an systems, donor-driven vertical
integrated assistance plan. There is support for various programs, poor data quality due
to low reporting rates and
activities but not for capacity building. Individual programs inconsistent reporting
play a dominant role in certain aspects such as monitoring and
evaluation. HIS policy guidelines and a strategic plan need to Critical HIS Challenges: There
be developed but have not yet garnered support from the is a personnel shortage, a need
various development partners. The list of donor projects for integrated information
systems, and policy standards
below is accurate as of the June 2008 HIS Assessment and is
likely a subset of all projects.124

Mexico
The Mexican health system is primarily socialized and
Country: Mexico decentralized, with the nation’s 32 states responsible for
providing most services and private providers playing an active
if secondary role. Often, private providers serve as higher
GNI per capita (2007): $8,340 quality alternatives to the overburdened public health sector,
with individuals choosing their own physicians, as opposed to
Acute Health Challenges: being assigned to specific physicians in the public health
Combined health problems of an
industrial society in cities and
system. In recent years, private providers in Mexico have been
infectious diseases in rural areas covered by private medical insurance in a manner similar to
that in the US.
Major Health Sector
Initiatives: e-Health initiative to Socialized medical services in Mexico are comprised by three
improve dissemination of public
major institutions:
health information, including
outbreaks
Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social (IMSS)
HIS Initiatives: National Health provides medical coverage to the private-sector
Information System for health population.
data collection; limited tertiary
hospital HIS and diseases
surveillance system Instituto de Seguridad y Servicios Sociales de los
Trabajadores del Estado (ISSSTE) provides coverage
HIS Type: NHIS allows for government employees.
evaluation of health system
performance; disease
surveillance system provides Secretaria de Salud (SSA) provides medical services to
information to general public,
including emergency readiness
citizens not directly covered by other providers (IMSS,
ISSSTE, or the armed forces). Besides providing direct
HIS Category: From Group 1 to medical services, SSA is the government agency
Group 3 regulating health policies and disease control.
According to the Health Metrics Network review of Mexico’s health information systems, all public and
private institutions and providers feed data on health provision, resources, and results to the National
Health Information System (NHIS), which is overseen by the Ministry of Health (MoH).125 In addition,
the NHIS also collects information from survey and statistical agencies such as the National System of
Health Surveys and National Institute of Statistics, Geography, and Informatics.126 The MoH in turn
acts as the guardian and disseminator of health data back to these sectors and to the population at large.
At the local level, the subsystems for services provided and for health needs are used to provide
information about supply and demand for health services and about disease prevalence (though the
System for Epidemiological Surveillance is the primary source of information in this area). A Technical
Committee on Health Statistics is headed by the Minister of Health and comprised of the heads of the
various agencies and institutions that contribute data to the NHIS.127

Because health provision is largely done by the states, the
NHIS is effectively the sum of the state health ministries and
systems, and the quality of NHIS data is therefore dependent HIS Strengths: Institutional
on the quality of regional data. The federal government infrastructure for data collection
and dissemination already in
enforces compliance with data forms and standards through place; public-dominated health
visits to state facilities.128 The federal MoH then aggregates system makes development of
data and publishes reports used to evaluate the success of national HIS easier if
individual health programs and to gain a clearer picture of the governments agree on standards
nation’s health status and challenges.
HIS Weaknesses: Top-down
imposition of data; poor data
Despite a structure designed to collect and accurately quality; communication
synthesize and analyze information, the NHIS suffers from deficiencies due to the lack of
major gaps, including the duplication of forms and reports as infrastructure in rural areas
they travel from lower levels up to the state and national
Critical HIS Challenges:
levels. Data quality remains highly variable, and private Developing a national,
providers often follow different standards or do not feed data automated HIS with uniform data
to the appropriate institutions at all. Most data collection and forms and standards will require
entry remains manual, and infrastructure in rural areas is a agreement from national and
state stakeholders, as well as
major barrier to improving that situation. In addition, health
private stakeholder input
data are not attached to specific patients and cannot be used
to improve treatment at the clinical level.129
Initiatives are moving toward some form of national HIS
The IMSS developed a computerized, records-based information system for use at tertiary hospitals
decades ago, and a limited deployment of the US Veterans Administration’s VistA patient flow system
was launched in Mexico before being eventually cancelled, and in its place a comprehensive electronic
medical record system is being developed and deployed by IMSS. Mexico already has an e-Health
program in place, initiated and administered by the federal government, which is currently being used
for disease surveillance and alerting purposes. The deployment of a comprehensive, automated health
information system that uses consistent technology and standards country-wide has been identified as a
priority by the government. Though infrastructure remains problematic, the socialized nature of
Mexico’s health system may make deploying such a system easier once agreement on standards is
reached and a plan for implementation moves forward.

Mozambique
Mozambique is one of the poorer countries in the Southern
Country: Mozambique African Development Community (SADC), with a 2002
Human Development Index (HDI) of 0.3549. Malaria is
endemic and highly prevalent,130 and the country’s HIV
GNI per capita (2007): $310 prevalence approaches 16% of the general population.131 Other
major causes of death and illness include respiratory infections
Acute Health Challenges: and diarrheal diseases.132
HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis,
diarrheal diseases, high infant
and maternal mortality
In spite of these significant health challenges, the
macroeconomic outlook for Mozambique has improved in
Major Health Sector recent years. The country’s HDI increased throughout the
Initiatives: Mozambique’s 1990s, and has continued to do so in this century. Similarly,
Action Plan for Reduction of GDP has increased between 7% and 11% per year since
Absolute Poverty to expand
primary health services, 1996.133 The Mozambican government has undertaken a large-
especially to disadvantaged scale national poverty reduction program134 that includes
groups, reduce maternal governmental reforms as well as significant expenditures on the
mortality by increasing the health system (doubling the per-capita funding from $4.60 to
availability of obstetric care,
improve infant and under-5
$9.60 between 1997 and 2001), including improving the
health by expanding overall care country’s HIS.135
and vaccination coverage, and
reduce malaria rates by In spite of its poverty, Mozambique has traditionally been
expanding a home-spraying more aggressive than many of its neighbors in terms of its ICT
campaign
policy. As early as 2000, the Mozambican government created a
HIS Initiatives: Initiative to National Council on ICT Policy, which has coordinated ICT
establish a national Health development efforts. This has included the purchase of a fiber-
Information Network; Open MRS optic submarine cable connecting Mozambique to the global
in use for HIV data collection; telecommunications network as well as developing a variety of
AED-SATELLIFE-sponsored
mobile data collection for malaria “e-government” systems to improve governmental
control. Weekly epidemiology efficiency.136
reports from district and
provincial health facilities Unfortunately, these developments are largely confined to
cities. Vast swaths of the country are without Internet or
HIS Type: Mostly paper-based
with some automated systems
telephone access, and rely on unreliable radio links or cellular
operated by NGOs telephones.137 This emphatically includes most of the country’s
health care facilities, almost all of whom still rely on outdated
HIS Category: Group 1 and inefficient paper-based information systems. A 2006
assessment of the country’s epidemiological reporting
infrastructure found significant under-reporting of many
diseases as well as poorly-trained and poorly-equipped staff at the local levels.138
Other assessments found the nation’s HIS to be a combination of paper-based reporting along with a
variety of computer systems dating back to the early 1990s, focusing on vertical submission of data to
specific programs or donor organizations with little or no downward movement of data.139 The
assessments also identified major staffing problems in the nation’s HIS, and little to no coordination
between the MOH and the national ICT council. Furthermore, the assessments revealed a large number

of different systems in use at the larger hospitals and some of
the district-level health offices. Unfortunately, the HIS Strengths: Strong
assessments found that the quality of these systems was government commitment to ICT
highly variable and few if any were considered adequate. use and infrastructure; several
functioning automated and
In addition to systems being used or created directly by the mobile-enabled silo systems
MOH, there are a variety of third parties implementing HIT HIS Weaknesses: Existing HIS
in Mozambique. At least once NGO is using OpenMRS to does not cover the entire health
manage HIV treatment.140 Another, AED-SATELLIFE, has sector; it is one among several
carried out pilot projects using hand-held GPS devices to routine collection systems, and is
track malaria treatment and prevention programs.141 AED is not coordinated with periodic
data collection; and it is a one-
also involved in a project to build a national health directional system
information network.142 Mozambique’s MOH has long-term
plans to improve its health information system, but faces Critical HIS Challenges: Re-
significant infrastructure challenges and will have to somehow structuring of the system does
not seem to be well-coordinated,
bring the current ecosystem of poorly-coordinated and although the government’s
overlapping efforts under control.143 national-level capacity to do so is
closer to sufficient than in many
other countries

Peru
With its challenging geography and ethnically and
Country: Peru
socioeconomically diverse population, Peru has long struggled
Population: 27 million to provide effective public services to its poorest and most
remote citizens. Recent economic growth has done little to lift
GNI per capita (2007): $3,886 the fortunes of these people, who continue to suffer from high
rates of infectious diseases and a lack of primary health care
Acute Health Challenges:
Infectious diseases (especially
services.
respiratory) and immunizations
The Peruvian health system is dominated by publicly-funded
Major Health Sector agencies, with the private practice providing services to
Initiatives: Decentralization of approximately 12% of the population.144 Private practice in
health services, improvement of
Peru operates as an alternative option to the sometimes
basic health provision to rural
areas insufficient public medical services (25% of the population in
Peru does not have access to consistent, accessible health
HIS Initiatives: Disease services).145
surveillance programs such as
Alerta DISAMAR and Cell Socialized medical services comprise three major participants:
PREVEN; local and private EMR
programs
The Ministry of Health (MINSA) is in charge of
HIS Type: Most effective public health initiatives in Peru. It has launched several
programs relate to disease initiatives aimed at combating the spread of infectious
surveillance; no functioning diseases and improving the provision of basic health
comprehensive HIS
services, particularly for rural Peruvians.
EsSalud, the social security system, covers workers in
the formal sector and their dependents, comprising
about 25% of the Peruvian population. This system is currently working to decentralize
and empower local units.
The military health system (Armed Forces Health Services and National Peruvian Police Health
Services) provides health services to 3% of the Peruvian population.146
The HIS initiatives in Peru fall into two main categories: disease surveillance programs and electronic
medical record systems developed at the local level or in private hospitals. All of the more integrative or
advanced HIS initiatives are isolated pilot projects, none of which have crystallized into a scalable
system that could be used for all of Peru. Scale of a different kind has been achieved by the most
prominent disease surveillance case, Alerta DISAMAR, a disease surveillance system developed by
Voxiva and implemented by the Peruvian Navy covering 97.5% of the Navy population (active duty
personnel and family members).147 The system uses multiple communication channels (radio, cell
phone, land line, and a web interface) to convey near real-time disease outbreak data from Navy bases
and medical units to a central unit. Instead of a disease outbreak report taking anywhere from ten days
to three weeks to reach the central unit where the decision is taken, it now takes only two to three
minutes. Reports and analysis can be performed immediately against this data. The reports and analysis
have enabled the Peruvian Navy to recommend improvements to vector control and food procurement

processes.148 Versions of Alerta DISAMAR have been implemented at the Peruvian Army (Alerta
DISALE) and Air Force, and in the military in Ecuador, Colombia, and Paraguay.149
Another successful disease surveillance program is Cell PREVEN, also based on the Voxiva platform,
which monitored adverse events to metronidazole treatment among female sex workers. Interviewers
collected data from female sex workers in three neighborhoods and used cell phones to enter and send
the data to an online database that was accessible worldwide over a secure Internet connection. In
return, key personnel received email and text messages on their cell phones alerting them about certain
symptoms.
Several EMR-based or functional area systems have been developed in Peru, but most have not been
designed to scale nationally. The e-Chasqui system developed by Partners in Health included an EMR
component as part of its tuberculosis treatment tracking and the NETLab lab result registration system
used by the Peruvian National Institutes of Health has proved effective at allowing patients and doctors
to access lab results and speeding up processing times. 150
Despite these isolated successes, Peru has not yet developed a long-range national eHealth vision and
strategy nor a cohesive plan for either developing a new comprehensive HIS or stitching together its
successful programs into a workable whole. A combination of factors serve to limit progress towards
this ideal: 1) Systems have been developed in isolation, not as part of a greater framework or plan or
design, resulting in fragmented, redundant systems and the use of obsolete technology; 2) The
organizational culture and political environment of the main
health providers has led to a lack of coordination, duplication
of effort, promising projects that do not reach fruition, and
HIS Strengths: Several small,
loss of time and human resources. 3) Standards and successful disease surveillance
legislation are at an insufficient stage of development, and and EMR-based systems
essential components such as patient identity registration,
data coding (diseases, treatments, etc.), and information HIS Weaknesses: Lack of a
exchange, security and confidentiality are not strongly long-range national eHealth
151 vision and strategy and a
enforced. comprehensive national plan for
integrating or scaling successful
In 2006 a national study commission was convened to programs
evaluate challenges facing the Peruvian health system and
make recommendations. In the commission’s final report Critical HIS Challenges:
Implementation of a nationwide
HIS was identified as a critical area of need and it was strategy and resources for
recommended that the government enlist consultants to adequate reach and service to
evaluate HIS needs and make specific recommendations.152 It the entire Peruvian population
does not appear that any such action has yet been taken.

Rwanda
Rwanda's current health system, as with all other aspects of the
Country: Rwanda
country, is shaped by the legacy of the 1994 genocide that
Population (2006): 9.5 million claimed the lives of approximately 1,000,000 Rwandans. This
catastrophe devastated the country's health care infrastructure
GNI per capita (2007): $320 and decimated its workforce153. Since the cessation of hostilities
in 1995, the government has made revitalizing the health care
Acute Health Challenges: system one of its top priorities, but many challenges still
HIV/AIDS, malaria, TB, diarrheal
diseases, lower respiratory
remain. Like many of its neighbors, Rwanda suffers from high
infections, malnutrition prevalence of HIV/AIDS (3.1% overall154, as high as 8.6%
among females in Kigali155) as well as a considerable burden of
Major Health Sector disease from malaria, tuberculosis, and diarrheal diseases.156
Initiatives: Expanded Program
on Immunization dedicated to
“reducing child morbidity and
The majority of health care expenditures in Rwanda come from
mortality due to vaccine- public sources, although private-sector health care is growing.157
preventable diseases”; As of 2007, there were nearly 400 private health facilities in
community insurance schemes Rwanda, the majority of which were run by nurses rather than
supplement health-sector
spending by the government;
physicians.158 The Ministry of Health (MoH) is responsible for
Health Sector Strategic Plan managing the public health care system, although eight other
2005-2009 a major effort by the government ministries are involved in various aspects of health
Rwandan government to achieve in Rwanda. The public health system is organized into health
MDG targets centers or hospitals, health districts, and the national level.
HIS Initiatives: GESIS,
TRACnet, FUCHIA, Quantimed, The Rwandan MoH has implemented several innovative
OpenMRS initiatives, including forms of pay-for-performance as well as
major donor-coordination efforts. Rwanda has also launched a
HIS Type: National HIS is community-based health insurance scheme, Mutuelle de Sante,
district-based; NGO programs
are HIV-related EMR; TRACnet
as an attempt to reduce the government's share of health-care
has mobile functionality funding. Mutuelle de Sante has met with some success,
although it is not without its critics.159 In addition to these
HIS Category: Moving from structural reforms, there are a variety of HIS systems in use in
Group 1 to Group 3 Rwanda, and they constitute a priority for the government.160
The Système d’Information Sanitaire (SIS or Health Information System) is Rwanda’s national health
data system defining the overall structures, processes, and information flows. Officially, clinic- and
center-level data are reported in aggregate using paper forms to district-level supervisors each month,
who are then responsible for entering the data into their local installations of GESIS (Gestion du
Système d’Information Sanitaire), the country's standard health information database application
supporting SIS (built in a long-obsolete version of Microsoft Access in 1997). After the data is entered,
the district-level supervisors physically send via disk their district's data to the central MoH, where each
district's data are loaded into the central database. According to a USAID/Rwandan MoH assessment
completed in 2006, this process was more or less adequate, with reporting rates in the 95% range at the
health center level and in the 75% range at the district level. In 2006, though, the Rwandan health care
system underwent major decentralization reforms, which included staffing and organizational changes.
This caused a significant disruption, and as of mid-2006 reporting rates for the center and district levels
had dropped to 47% and 35%, respectively.161

Developed by Voxiva, TRACnet is a web- and IVR-based reporting system built on a Microsoft SQL
Server database platform to track a variety of indicators related to the provision of anti-retroviral
treatments for HIV/AIDS. As of mid-2006, the system was in use by approximately 100 clinics and
that number was expected to grow to 160 by the end of the year.162 By utilizing cellular phones,
TRACnet enables medical personnel all over Rwanda to enter data directly, although in practice it
appears as though most data are initially collected using paper forms and then manually entered via
telephone or web form. This process appears to be the major problem with the system, as manually
combining and then entering the data can take considerable time due to the large amount of
information captured by each form.163
Other HIS systems in use in Rwanda for HIV/AIDS and HIS Strengths: 10+ years of
experience successfully using
ARV management include Quantimed (an MS Access-
computers for data collection,
based drugs logistics system used for tracking drug strong governmental support for
consumption and supply) and the Partners in Health HIS
OpenMRS system.164 There is some overlap between the
functionality of TRACnet, Quantimed, and Partners in HIS Weaknesses: Several
different systems collecting
Health. There are also a small number of facilities using varied health statistics,
Médecins sans Frontières' FUCHIA system for TB and duplication of data, insufficient
HIV/AIDS patient-level data collection.165 Finally, (and insufficiently) trained staff
Rwanda's CNLS (Conseil National de Lutte contre le
SIDA/National Council of the Fight Against AIDS) Critical HIS Challenges:
Centralizing different HIS
maintains its own master database of donors and their systems into a single
programs in Rwanda.

Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone has spent the first part of this century emerging
Country: Sierra Leone from a decade-long civil war that had profound effects on the
nation's health care system. A 2002 assessment by the Ministry
of Health and Sanitation and Statistics (MoHS) found that
GNI per capita (2006): $230 roughly 50% of the Sierra Leone's health care facilities were
destroyed during the war,166 and resulted in thousands of
Acute Health Challenges: amputees and more than 100,000 deaths.167 Furthermore, the
High child and maternal
conflict disrupted numerous long-standing public health
mortality, diarrheal diseases,
respiratory infections and other projects, which has allowed several diseases that had been
infectious diseases including under control before the war to stage comebacks (most notably
drug-resistant TB Onchocerciasis).168
Major Health Sector Today, Sierra Leone is one of the poorest countries on Earth. A
Initiatives: Decentralization of
health services, reintegration of 2004 WHO report described the country's poverty as stemming
combatants from civil war, from a variety of causes, including "the decade long war, low
malaria and tuberculosis agricultural productivity, low educational levels; low levels of
management wages and salaries for formal and informal workers; poor
HIS Initiatives: Newly-
investment climate, high unemployment rate, corruption and
launched District Health failure to better make use of natural resources; poor health
Information Management status, and high fertility and population growth rates."169 Given
System, captures and aggregates the country's economic challenges, it is unsurprising that most
data from peripheral health units of its major health problems stem from poverty: malaria,
HIS Type: Built using HMN
respiratory infections, diarrheal diseases, STIs, and tuberculosis
reference framework; includes are some of the major causes of outpatient morbidity.170
specialized low-power hardware
as well as paper-based Nevertheless, Sierra Leone's economic outlook has improved
components somewhat in recent years. The World Bank's "Doing Business
2009" report noted that the country's business reforms have
made it much easier to start new businesses or register and buy
land, and rates Sierra Leone favorably when compared with its
neighbors.171 Furthermore, the country's GNI has increased
dramatically in recent years, nearly doubling between 2000 and 2007.172
Following the cessation of hostilities in 2002, Sierra Leone's government— together with the WHO
and the UN— set about rebuilding its health care system, and one of their major priorities has been the
country's HIS. In 2004 and 2005, the government sponsored several studies of the existing HIS
infrastructure. These studies identified numerous challenges facing health information in Sierra Leone,
including poorly-trained staff, under-reporting of data, and the presence of poorly-coordinated and
overlapping data collection systems.173 In 2006, Sierra Leone received a Health Metrics Network
(HMN) grant, part of which funded a formal assessment of the country's health information system
status conducted by the country's consumers and producers of health information, as well as
representatives from various donor organizations. The assessment was carried out using the HMN
Assessment Tool, and painted a similar picture to that of the 2004 and 2005 assessments. It also
proposed several specific courses of action to the Ministry of Health Services, mostly involving capacity
building.

Following the 2006 assessment, the MoHS and the HMN continued to collaborate. Sierra Leone has
served as a pilot site for several different HIS projects, including OpenMRS and DHIS, and has
continued to use the HMN.174 Furthermore, NGOs such as Inveneo have piloted innovative hardware
projects, including low-power-consumption computers that
can take better advantage of solar power than traditional
PCs.175 In addition to computerized information systems, HIS Strengths: Computerized
system to systematically collect
Sierra Leone has served as a proving ground for several data, immediate information for
creative informatics solutions that require no power and can evidence based decision making,
be used anywhere. For example, the University of Oslo’s improved drug management and
informatics department has developed and fielded a stone- tracking, efficient and
transparent procedures
based birth registration system intended for use by traditional
birth attendants, who are often illiterate and work in remote HIS Weaknesses: Lack of
parts of the country.176 qualified information officers in
many district hospitals,
In late 2008, the Ministry of Health and Sanitation insufficient availability of
infrastructure equipment (e.g.,
announced a new HIS initiative built on version 2 of HISP's computers) at the district level
DHIS system that will collect a wide variety of data from all
levels of the health system, including immunization, ART, Critical HIS Challenges:
and malaria control data. The new system represents a Effective coordination of health
collaboration between Sierra Leone's MoHS, the University information is lacking, resulting
in duplication and gaps in data
of Sierra Leone College of Medicine and Allied Health collection, reporting, use and
Services, the WHO's HMN, the World Bank, the University management of data.
of Oslo's HISP, and Inveneo.177 As of August 2008, the new Consequently, vast amounts of
system was already in use in four of Sierra Leone's thirteen data collected remain mostly
incomplete, unreliable, and
health districts, and the immediate post-launch plan called for unused
the system to be rolled out to the remaining nine districts.178

South Africa
In 1994, the Ministry of Health established the National Health
Country: South Africa Information System/South Africa (NHIS/SA) committee,
comprised of multiple stakeholders from government,
academia, and the private sector, charged with creating a
GNI per capita (2007): $5,760 strategy to develop a national health information system.
NHIS/SA projects include the “National Health
HIV/AIDS (16.6% of the Care Management Information System (NHC/MIS), standards,
population), cardiovascular
disease, infant mortality
vital registration, telemedicine, geographic information systems,
… the district health information system.”179
Major Health Sector
Initiatives: National Strategic The National Department of Health (NDOH) and provincial
HIV/AIDS plan, which will guide departments of health for each of the nine provinces are
the South African National AIDS
responsible for public health services and budgets, with
Council from 2007 to 2011
municipalities providing a limited amount of primary health
HIS Initiatives: National DOH care. The government is the dominant health care provider,
developed a strategic framework with 9,500 doctors serving 82% of the population, or 40 million
for the development of a national people, using just 40% of annual national health spending. The
electronic health record system
(eHR.za) that requires
other 60% is expended on the private sector, comprised of
interoperability with legacy 25,000 doctors who serve the remainder of the population, 8.5
systems. A contract has been million people.180
awarded to a consortium of
vendors to develop this system There is strong national support for the development of
eHealth in general. eHealth is a priority for the Presidential
HIS Type: Paper-based at the
clinic level, computerized at the National Commission on Information Society and
sub-district or district levels. Development (PNC on ISAD) for the creation of an
information society and a means to bridging the digital divide.
HIS Category: Group 3 The NDOH has created a Draft e-Health White Paper
Discussion Document outlining an e-Health policy.181
However, there are weaknesses in the policy and in execution.
For instance, the document highlights the human capacity issue but capacity development and planning
for health informatics are missing from the National Human Resources for Health plan.182
The HIS environment is characterized by numerous fragmented computerized systems for electronic
medical records, certain vertical programs, yet South Africa is also innovating in mHealth solutions.
NDOH, provinces, and commercial providers comprise the main developers of HIS for both hospitals
and smaller clinics. The following is a sample of the systems in place:
The District Health Information System (DHIS)
DHIS originated out of a project by the Health Information Systems Programme (HISP) in the western
Cape funded by NORAD in 1996-1998. It has since become well-established in South Africa and has
been implemented in other developing countries in Africa and Asia.183 The system records data about
all facility services as well as infrastructure and human resources.184 Clinics fill out paper-based registers,
tallies, and monthly collection forms and on a monthly basis send them to the sub-district or district for

data entry into DHIS. At this level the data is analyzed and reports are generated for distribution to the
district, province, and national level. The technology used is based on free and open source software. A
recent study that reviewed ten primary health care clinics found that “each clinic reported a high
perceived work burden for data collection and collation” and “Seven out of 10 clinics reported that
collation took 1 staff member about 2 days per month” with only one clinic having a clerk185.
National Electronic TB Register
The Electronic TB Register is a nation-wide system with about 200 users over nine provinces. More
than 1 million patients from 2003 to 2005 are in the system, which is based on SQL Server.186
Other systems include the Patient Administration and Billing (PAAB) system developed by the NDOH
running in a few locations, and PADS, a web-based patient registration and billing system developed by
an in-house team of the Free State province. There is an active market of commercial software
providers offering large-scale hospital EMR systems and major international IT companies researching
or piloting eHealth solutions.187 Western Cape Province appears to be progressive, implementing a
central hospital information system with a unique patient ID, a pharmacy system, digital radiology, and
community health care clinics and local city clinics that access the same provincial level patient ID.188
Despite all the support and active implementations of various HIS, not all provinces have all
components of the NHC/MIS. EMR systems are somewhat functional in just one-third of provincial
hospitals. There are five types of systems in use and there is little integration between them.189
Computer and Internet access is not commonly found in state hospitals or at the provincial level.
“Several studies have shown that nurses often return, after training, to work environments where they
are denied access to computers for various reasons, or work in settings in which computer usage is not
part of their daily job requirement. Many health workers do not have, or have not been exposed to a
culture of data acquisition and analysis.”190
The private sector also faces the same problem of fragmented HIS Strengths: Political will for
eHealth, active commercial
systems. The government projects do not appear to include market for EMR and eHealth
integration with private sector systems in their scope. 191 solutions, innovations in mobile
health
One tool used for national level data analysis is the District
Health Barometer (DHB), to analyze the quality, efficiency, HIS Weaknesses: Fragmented
systems; low computer literacy
and equity of primary health care delivery. It combines data and too few people trained or
from DHIS as well as the national TB register, and systems experienced in health
such as StatsSA and the National Treasury. informatics; burdensome data
collection; broadband is still out
South Africa has notable mobile health initiatives under way. of reach of many and is
expensive and is inhibiting the
The OpenROSA/JavaROSA project is developing open growth of HIS
source health applications for mobile phones and personal
digital assistants (PDAs). Cell-Life is a well-known nonprofit Critical HIS Challenges: Need
company that has developed a variety of HIV/AIDS health to create holistic plans to develop
management solutions for mobile phones and PDAs based human capacity; need to develop
culture of using data for decision-
on open source technology (they are a part of the making; e-Health policy is behind
OpenROSA/JavaROSA consortium). SmartCare, a patient e-Health development
records system deployed in both Zambia and Ethiopia, has
also been adapted for piloting at 13 sites in Eastern Cape

province.
Uganda
As one of the first countries affected by the AIDS pandemic,
Country: Uganda Uganda also became one of the first to implement a serious,
effective strategy at slowing the rate of infection and coping
with the disease burden the disease poses. The struggle against
GNI per capita (2007): $340 AIDS has colored and shaped many of Uganda’s health reform
efforts in the past two decades.
HIV/AIDS, high infant and Uganda achieved or surpassed many output targets under the
maternal mortality
Health Sector Strategic Plan I 2000/01 – 2004/05 (HSSP I).192
Major Health Sector
Health care usage became much more affordable for the poor,
Initiatives: Government with the elimination of usage fees at government health
establishment of the Health facilities except for private wings of hospitals. The health
Review Commission which system refocused its approach to focus on primary health care,
resulted in the development of
three-year, five-year and ten-
reallocating resources and decentralizing health service delivery
year plans as well as the Health to lower levels of the system, specifically the districts and
Sector Strategic Plan (HSSP) I health sub-districts (HSD).
and II
Health sector strategic plan II 2005/06 –
HIS Initiatives: Investments
made for development of routine 2009/10
facility based HIS. Surveys for
population-based data sources; (HSSP II) extends the goals of HSSP I through the Uganda
Uganda HIN uses wireless PDAs National Minimum Healthcare Package (UNMHCP).
for data transmission
UNMHCP is both a set of interventions targeting morbidity
HIS Type: Paper–based at the and mortality as well as a tool for health sector resource
local levels, computer-based at allocation primarily at the district and HSD levels. HSSP II is
the district and national level aimed squarely at the Millennium Development Goals
(MDGs).
The Ugandan HMIS has evolved over more than 15 years,193

encompassing data from all levels of the health system: the
village or grass roots health unit, parish, sub-county, HSD, district, and national level. Data are captured
using a hybrid of paper forms, registers, and tally sheets at the health unit level. The kind of data
collected is primarily patient data and mortality but also includes health care facilities, staffing, drug
supplies, family planning, and population. On a weekly, monthly, and annual basis routine data are sent
to the district level, which in turn recompiles the data and sends them to the national headquarters
either in person or via fax. A few districts have computers and use spreadsheets to compile the reports
and email them to the headquarters. There, data are entered into the national health databank using
software called EPI Info.194 An attempt is being made to standardize the software used at the district
level by piloting a local version of EPI Info in seven districts.195
Uganda has invested heavily to develop the HMIS and the Integrated Diseases Surveillance and
Response System (IDSR). Health Metrics Network’s assessment of the various data sources in Uganda
is that the census data and data acquired through population surveys are adequate in most respects

(content, capacity and practices, dissemination, integration and use), but vital records, health and
disease records (from HMIS, IDSR and the Demographic Surveillance System [DSS]), health service
records, and administrative records are present but not adequate.196 There is a well-defined, core set of
indicators for which data are being generated at all levels, but with respect to the HMIS and IDSR data,
the effort to collect this indicator data overwhelms the human capacity at the local levels and possibly
impacts the quality of the data.
At the national level, health and population information is being used to inform policy and priority
discussions and decisions, including in health sector budget negotiations between the Ministry of
Health and Finance. At the lower levels, however, health information is not being analyzed or used for
resource planning or policy advocacy, due to the lack of capacity.
Uganda has also seen innovation in HIS in the mobile health sphere. The Uganda Health Information
Network, a project of AED-SATELLIFE, Uganda Chartered HealthNet, and Makerere University,
allows health workers to collect patient information via wirelessly-enabled PDAs. The information they
collect can then be “beamed” to an access point and uploaded to a central data warehouse, and
information can also be downloaded to the PDAs, giving workers access to health data about their
area.197 The Uganda HIN is an example of how mobile technology can be used to compensate for
infrastructure weaknesses by leveraging cellular networks.
Unfortunately, there is a proliferation of information systems

development efforts, often donor-driven, without an HIS Strengths: Good use of HIS
overarching framework and coordination to reduce information at national level for
planning, budgeting, and
redundancy and leverage existing systems. Uganda’s health resource allocation; well-defined
system also lacks a strategy to maximize the potential of the national core indicator set used
data from routine health information systems such as the by most data sources, including
HMIS and the population data sources to be used to reporting on MDGs
measure health sector performance and impact of
HIS Weaknesses: Lower levels
interventions. are not using HIS data for
decision-making and suffer
Not surprisingly, there is a rural-urban divide with respect to higher staff turnover and weaker
ICT infrastructure and human capacity. The ICT ICT infrastructure than at the
infrastructure between the district and national levels is national level
adequate enough for data transmission, whereas it is weak at Critical HIS Challenges:
the lower levels. ICT management is stronger at the national Insufficient funding and shortage
level, where the Resource Centre of the Ministry of Health of qualified staff; poor
coordinates HIS activities. There is high staff turnover in harmonization and streamlining
of various data sources;
rural districts yet no plan for long-term training on health
proliferation of parallel, hence
information to ensure sustainability of the HIS and quality of redundant, HIS development
the data. There is no training policy in general for health projects
information officers regardless of the level in the health
system.

Vietnam
Since the launch of doi moi (“renovation”) in 1986, Vietnam’s
Country: Vietnam health sector has undergone dramatic changes. The health
system has been developing under the guidelines of the Ten-
Year Socio-Economic Development Strategy, the
GNI per capita (2007): $790 Comprehensive Poverty Reduction and Growth Strategy and
the National Strategy for People’s Healthcare 2001–2010.198
Health Challenges: Relatively
high maternal and neonatal The Vietnamese government has issued a series of decisions
mortality, primarily among related to the country’s health statistical information system,
ethnic minorities in remote
areas; high rate of induced
creating part of the empowering environment for a national
abortion; infectious, vector-borne health information system, exemplified by this sample of
and communicable diseases such decisions by the Minister of Health:
as SARS, avian influenza, malaria
and parasitic diseases;
 Decision on Regulation No. 379/2002/QD-BYT dated
increasing incidence of TB,
HIV/AIDS, dengue fever and August 2, 2002, legislating the collection and analysis of
Japanese encephalitis health statistics, recording and reporting functions, tasks
and authority of health facilities nationwide, and greater
Major Health Sector responsibilities of managers and workers involved in the
Initiatives: Vietnam Health
Insurance (VHI), consisting of
health information system.199
both mandatory and voluntary
schemes  Decision No. 2553/2002/QD-BYT dated April 7, 2002,
establishing a list of essential health indicators. The goal of
HIS Initiatives: Medisoft 2003, the decision includes standardizing data collection and
built by the MoH for hospital calculation methods, improved data quality, and enhanced
statistical reporting
use of data in analysis, assessments and policy making.200
HIS Type: Combination of paper
reports, log books, and PCs;  Decision No. 1833/2002/QD-BYT dated May 17, 2002,
hierarchical data flow from the on management software for the grassroots health
village level to the central level system.201
HIS Category: Group 1 overall,  Decision No. 2824/2004/QD-BYT dated August 19,
automation occurs mostly at 2004, stipulating that Medisoft 2003 be the standard
higher levels in the health sector
software for all hospital statistic medical reports.202
In the early 90s, the Ministry of Health (MoH) introduced
mandatory and voluntary health insurance schemes managed by Vietnam Health Insurance (VHI).
Today there are three types of insurance schemes on the market: 1) Mandatory coverage, which covers
all types of workers in the public sector, and only permanent workers in private sector. 2) Voluntary
schemes, including various types of coverage for school children, and the Farmer Voluntary Insurance
Scheme, in which the provincial authorities contribute up to 70% of the farmers’ premiums. 3)
Government coverage scheme, which primarily provides fully subsidized health care for the poor.
According to one report, these “schemes disadvantage the most vulnerable in the face of informal user
charges” because in practice many physicians are reluctant to provide health care to patients who have
insurance cards in favor of those who can afford to pay service fees out-of-pocket.203

The Ministry of Health is driving the use of information technology in the health sector in Vietnam, in
particular by providing financial support for hospital usage of IT.204 As a result, national and provincial
hospitals appear to be making greater use of IT than the rest of the public health system.205
Approximately 300 hospitals in Vietnam were using Medisoft 2003 software (developed by MoH) in
2007 to manage medical statistics reports and records.206 Some hospitals are using telemedicine,
specifically tele-consultation, tele-surgery assistance, tele-imaging, and tele-cardiology.207
General Health Statistics Information System (GHSIS)
Vietnam’s General Health Statistical Information System aggregates health data from various
subsystems and from the different levels of the public health system to assess health outcomes and
effectiveness of the health sector. Health information is derived from multiple subsystems of national
health programs, communicable disease surveillance systems, and statistical information systems of
other sectors and ministries, such as the General Statistics Office (GSO), National Committee on
Population, Family and Child Affairs, and Ministry of Justice. These systems, however, still fail to
provide the information needed to support management and policy decisions.208
GHSIS is hierarchical in structure, interlinked with each health system level (the village, the commune,
the district, the provincial and the central levels). The process is fairly typical, with the lower levels
sending data to the next higher level for compilation and summarization before sending the
summarized report to the next level. At the provincial level, there are on average one or two statistical
and information workers who are responsible for the data
collection and processing covering all people in the province.
HIS Strengths: Support of the
A shortcoming of the GHSIS, according to the Health government through legislation
Metrics Network Assessment Report, participants at all levels and policy decisions recognizing
reported that despite government support, there is no real the need for standard data
database to support data reporting and management. Data are collection and reporting
mechanisms, data quality, list of
still recorded in books, on paper, and on computers for those indicators, the use of data for
who have them, making data consolidation a time-consuming decision-making, and the
process. The software for HIS and the subsystems is benefits information technology
inadequate for the task. can bring to the health sector
HIS Weaknesses: Data are

Shortages in the provision of basic IT systems are common. captured using multiple means,
Computers and software are more likely to be found at the making data consolidation
upper levels of the public health system than the lower difficult and time-consuming;
levels,209 yet provincial and district hospitals, even at the lack of quality data inhibits the
use of data for decision-making
central level, still are not equipped with computers in many
departments and wards, and at the provincial and district level Critical HIS Challenges: Lack
statistical workers must share a computer.210 Financing also of stable network connectivity
appears to be unevenly distributed within the levels of the and reliable mobile service limits
health system. Lack of financial resources is affecting the the technical options for
developing a national, integrated
rollout of software and is also having a detrimental effect on HIS
investment in equipment and in people.211

Appendix A: Value Chain Analysis
Introduction
The health sector in developing countries is a complex network of formal and informal institutions
facing immense challenges of resource capacity, infrastructure, geography, economy, and politics.
Numerous papers have cited these challenges and suggested remedies, yet there has been little guidance
regarding where to begin and how to prioritize efforts, a course of treatment if you will. For similarly
complex sectors, such as the automobile and agriculture industries, value chain analysis (VCA) has been
a tool for analyzing where value or competitive advantage is created in the chain (such as marketing),
where there may be bottlenecks or constraints (such as suppliers), and quantifying the impact. This
approach is also being used by the US health sector. Value chain analysis can and is being applied just
as effectively to the health sector in developing countries, offering a methodical and rational approach
to not only identifying but also prioritizing the numerous challenges and opportunities in the health
sector value chain. Specifically with respect to this paper’s research objective, VCA can help identify
what information is key to evaluating performance of the health system and where in the value chain is
good indicator data most needed for good decision-making. HIS interventions and upgrading strategies
can then be targeted at these specific needs at these specific points in the value chain.
Background and definition of value chain analysis
The traditional definition of a value chain is the set of activities within a firm necessary to produce the
product or service sold by the firm i. Each activity along the chain may create or increase the value of
the end product or service, and may incur a cost. Management and strategy professionals have used
value chain analysis to help firms identify where the most value is created, which activities are most
costly, and ultimately where resources should be applied to gain competitive advantage. Using a variety
of sources of information, they’re able to identify and estimate various activities and relationships, such
as the cost of inputs and outputs at each point in the value chain, the volume of the physical flow of
commodities along the value chain, and the flow and value of services, consultants, and skills along the
chain212.
The international development community is applying the value chain concept more broadly to
examine industry sectors, such as the avocado industry in Kenya and handmade leather shoes in India,
in the realization that in globalized markets, the competitiveness of a firm and specifically micro, small,
and medium enterprise (MSME) competitiveness is linked to the competitiveness of their industry as a
whole213. A particular industry involves multiple actors to bring the product to market, starting with the
suppliers of raw inputs such as fertilizer and seeds, firms that assemble, finish, and package the product
the intermediaries such as distributors who sell to local retailers or exporters who will in turn sell the
product to global retailers who sell to consumers. A weakness at any point in the value chain can render
an industry less competitive in a global market.
i
See “Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance” by Michael Porter, the pioneer of the value chain concept,
for the classic definition of value chains.
Page 95 • Appendix A: Value Chain Analysis Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009
Value chain analysis involves reviewing the end market or consumer of the good or service. As they
say, the “customer is king”, and they will drive the product features, pricing, quality, and distribution as
well as other factors that the value chain must accommodate in order to satisfy the end market.
Vertical linkages are the relationships and activities between actors at different levels in the chain.
These interactions require communication, information, and trust. The power dynamics within these
vertical linkages can determine incentives and potential benefits for an actor in the chain, as well as
drive their behavior. Actors also work within horizontal linkages either in competition or
collaboration with each other. Industry associations are an example of horizontal cooperation.
Particularly for the health sector but important for all sectors is an understanding of the business
enabling environment, that is, the overall context within which an industry operates. Government
stability, political environment, trends, policies, standards, international agreements, and public
infrastructure (roads, transportation, electricity, and telecommunications) can all have positive or
negative effects on the performance of a value chain or create incentives or disincentives. The strength
of supporting markets can also affect value chain performance, as they provide support services to
actors or help them perform better or increase capacity. Supporting markets may be sector-specific,
such as custom design houses, cross-cutting such as information technology services, or financial such
as banks and investors.
The diagram below illustrates these components and linkages:
Global Enabling Environment

Global Retailers
National Enabling Environment
Exporters National Retailers

Supporting’Markets
Sector specific providers

(exchanges, specialty
equipment, marketing,
etc.)
Wholesalers
Cross Cutting Providers

(Insurance, transport,
communications, etc.)
Producers
Finance
Resource
Suppliers
Figure 9 - Value Chain Structure for Markets
Value chain analysis of the health sector
In the US, experts have recognized the applicability of VCA to the health sector and are employing
value chain analysis to identify ways to improve the US health sector, as evidenced by various
publications such as “The Healthcare Value Chain: Producers, Purchasers, and Providers” and “The
Business of Healthcare Innovation” by Lawton R. Burns published in 2002 and 2005 respectively, and
“Redefining Healthcare: Creating Value-Based Competition on Results” co-written by the expert on
value chain analysis, Michael Porter, published in 2006. In 2007 and 2008 the Federal Reserve Bank of
Chicago and the Detroit Regional Chamber held conferences discussing the value chain approach to
evaluating the health care delivery system, and how it might lead to higher quality health care, lower
costs, and greater user accessibility214.
The following high-level diagram of the US health care value chain does not attempt to show every
linkage between the value chain actors but groups them according to role. Implicit in the diagram is
that funding flows along the upper tier, while innovation flows along the lower tier.
Figure 10 - US Health Care Value Chain
International development practitioners are beginning to apply value chain analysis to the health care
sector in developing countries. ACDI/VOCA is addressing geographic constraints in the Philippines, in
an area comprised of 300 islands by providing distance education via radio and a floating clinic215. The
Private Sector Partnerships-One Project (PSP-One ) is using the value chain approach to examine the
value chain for contraceptive products and services216:
Using value chain analysis to analyze health sector performance in

developing countries
Just as in other sectors, the health sector in developing countries is a complex network of actors,
relationships, and activities, each with different incentives and capabilities operating under an overall
governance structure and context. The challenges are many, the needs are great, but resources to apply
to these challenges are scarce or in high demand and therefore must be applied wisely to maximize the
return on the investment. The holistic approach that value chain analysis offers enables one to
understand the interdependencies and dynamics within the sector, so that any proposed interventions
will improve the overall performance of the value chain, not be counter-productive, and have lasting,
broader impact.
To illustrate, below is an initial conceptual diagram of a typical health sector value chain in a developing
country:
Figure 11 - Illustrative Health Sector Value Chain in a Developing Country
This diagram does not attempt to depict every actor in the health sector, but shows a few key actors
under each of the major segments of Finance, Policy and Planning, Procurement and Resource
Management, and Service Delivery. It also shows components that provide a foundation for HIS
throughout the value chain.
In a chain of activities as complex as those involved in the health system it is challenging to determine
what changes might deliver the most valuable improvements and which investments therefore offer the
greatest return. Value chain analysis provides a framework to dive deeper into the question of where
HIS could improve health sector performance by focusing attention on two key questions. What is the
value contributed by a particular activity or function? What information is essential to performing that
function or activity most effectively and efficiently? With answers to these questions it is then possible
to prioritize reforms to make essential information available when and where it is needed with quality
and reliability.
Detailed value chain analysis is beyond the scope of this study, but a simple example of a disease
surveillance system serves to illustrate the approach. The ultimate value of disease surveillance to health
is reduced incidence of disease. The immediate value added to the health system is the rapid delivery of
information (notifications) to other parts of the health system and the certain detection of outbreaks
upon which the health system can respond. Information must quickly reach those who can act upon it.
The actors might include not only policy makers in central ministries, but clinicians, suppliers, facility
managers and others. They are all rendered less effective by the typical manual, paper-based
information capture process that must traverse a vertical chain to reach a central or national office. This
process diminishes the value of the surveillance system. Information technology adds value by
networking all the links in the chain and enabling electronic data capture and transmission to the central
office within seconds through the use of a PC, cell phone, or PDA connected to a database system. The
IT intervention empowers these actors with information and the ability to act and make decisions more
quickly. For the process of detection, information systems add value by providing the reporting,
analysis, and GIS tools to accurately detect an emerging outbreak, pattern or hot spot. The alternative
process is unwieldy and ineffective: the time-consuming, manual compilation and analysis of data that
must be extracted from mounds of paper reports. By the time an outbreak pattern is detected, it could
be too late or the response must be amplified in the way of more resources or more drastic
containment measures, straining the capacity of the health system. Effectiveness means that speed of
detection and response is vital. Time is the scarce resource whose value must be maximized.
Determining what information enables each of these functions to respond most effectively is key to
maximizing the value added by such a surveillance system. Viewing a surveillance system in the context
of a larger value chain thus highlights the full spectrum of information dependencies across the value
chain and encourages a systemic approach to health information systems.
Childhood immunizations programs provide another useful example. The value added by
immunization, the prevention of disease, depends on a number of prior activities in the health system
value chain: identification of those not (or already) immunized, order and delivery of supplies,
recruitment, training and assignment of personnel, and notice to the population of the event.
Maximizing the effectiveness of an immunization campaign thus depends on information systems that
are both directly and indirectly related to the administration of immunizations. Improving the
effectiveness of a particular immunization campaign, and the resulting value added to the health system,
will depend on better information from information systems that monitor vaccine supplies and health
records that document vaccinations. If the immunization campaign was targeted at infants, birth
registries can be compared to immunization records to see if the immunization reached all infants.
These systems are both outside the immediate domain of supply chain management or clinical care yet
they add value to the planning of vaccination campaigns. The analysis of the value of any component
information system, and designing it to add greatest value, must take into account the value added to
these downstream activities.
Realizing how various activities in the health system depend on the value added by other activities
earlier in the value chain, and how information systems supporting activities at one place in the value
chain indirectly add value to activities later in the chain, provides a more substantial basis upon which
to evaluate the potential return on information system investments.
Sources
The USAID papers are listed here:

http://www.microlinks.org/ev_en.php?ID=18404_201&ID2=DO_TOPIC
Links to individual papers are:

Campbell, Ruth. (January 2008). The Value Chain Framework Briefing Paper. USAID. Retrieved on December 15, 2008 from
http://www.microlinks.org/ev_en.php?ID=21629_201&ID2=DO_TOPIC.
Campbell, Ruth. (July 2008). Key Elements of the Value Chain Approach Briefing Paper. USAID. Retrieved on December 15, 2008
from http://www.microlinks.org/ev_en.php?ID=24002_201&ID2=DO_TOPIC.
Choudhary, Vikas. (October 2008). Strengthening Vertical Linkages Briefing Paper. USAID. Retrieved on December 15, 2008 from
http://www.microlinks.org/ev_en.php?ID=27776_201&ID2=DO_TOPIC
Dunn, Elizabeth; Parsons, Holly. (May 2007). MSE Upgrading in Value Chains Briefing Paper. USAID. Retrieved on December 15,
2008 from http://www.microlinks.org/ev_en.php?ID=17737_201&ID2=DO_TOPIC.
Kaplinsky, R., and M. Morris. (2001). A Handbook for Value Chain Research. Report prepared for the IDRC. Retrieved on December
12, 2008 from http://www.bdsknowledge.org/dyn/bds/docs/detail/395/1.
Appendix B: HIS 2.0
A Service-oriented view of HIS
A health system is composed of people performing a variety of activities. It’s therefore difficult to
imagine strengthening health systems without improving the effectiveness of the people who make up
the system, particularly those immediately responsible for providing services (educational and
preventive as well as clinical services). Strengthening health systems and improving the effectiveness of
service delivery relies on two broadly distinct types of information. Basic operational data underpin the
routine business activities of the health system. Medical records enable effective clinical care. Inventory
records track supplies and medicines, and so forth. At the same time, one also requires summary data
(“indicators”) to manage the overall resources of the health system, set policies and evaluate the
effectiveness of programs. Health system strengthening requires quality information of both types, but
current thinking about HIS often emphasizes the latter at the expense of the former.
Established thinking views HIS as an overlay on the activities of the health system to collect data on
indicators for use by a limited group of managers, policy makers and researchers. Emphasis focuses
consolidating indicators from a variety of separate sources into a single datastore (so-called “data
warehouse”) for analysis and reporting. In this conception, information flows upward through isolated
independent silos from front-line health workers to a repository at higher levels. Minimal attention is
given to the information needs of practitioners at the local level or the importance of sharing of
information across different parts of the health system.
An alternative approach sees HIS as an integral part of a health system in which critical data is routinely
captured at the point of service and is readily and immediately made available wherever else it is needed.
Conceived in this way, HIS is understood as a network of information flows among actors in the health
system, each with particular needs according to the activities they are engaged in. But the information
that will enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of their activities will often originate elsewhere.
Determining what information is most needed where and making that information available where it is
needed is the central purpose of HIS in this understanding. To be sure, technology has an important
role to play in this kind of system. But what matters most from this perspective is not the technology,
but what information is needed, by whom and for what purposes.
By way of illustration, suppose a community health worker (CHW) attends a birth. Information on the
successful delivery may be added to a patient health record. A live birth is documented for vital
registration. A new health record may be generated for the child. Birth weight and other indicator data
will be communicated to the health district. Immunizations will be administered and documented for
the health ministry. The use of a birthing kit and immunization packet consumes supplies that reduce
inventory and need to be reordered. If the mother is HIV positive, lab tests for the child may be
required. Lab results will be communicated to the patient and a clinician who may prescribe medication.
The CHW will need to schedule a follow up visit to mother and child and will need to know about the
test results to advise the mother appropriately. The diagram in Figure 1 illustrates how information
originating in such an interaction is associated with a variety of hypothetical information flows through
the health system. This view does not attempt to capture all entities or activities in the health system,
but merely illustrates how a single event can trigger the flow of information to enable multiple activities.
Page 101 • Appendix B: HIS 2.0 Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009
Figure 12 – Hypothetical Information Flow
Note that the information flows described do not occur within any single application or organization,
but occur predominantly between organizations that might be using entirely different arrangements,
including different computer applications, for the management information relevant to their respective
activities. Information flows also move in different directions up, down and across the system. What
matters is that information be available where it is needed (which does not preclude central repositories,
but repositions them as a part of the information system, not the focus).
In this view, the principal goal is not collecting or aggregating data, but optimizing information flows
among heterogeneous systems and building human capacity throughout to use information to improve
performance. Optimizing information flows emphasizes what information is most needed to conduct
specific activities well and where that information originates. Technology is then a means to increase
the efficiency of collection, communication and management.
This approach to thinking about HIS has several important advantages.
 It recognizes the importance of front line service delivery activities and the value of operational
information to directly support those activities.
 It does not exclude the private sector, where significant spending and service delivery occur
even in low income countries.
 Because it does not hinge upon the building of any large unified computerized information
system, this approach recognizes the value of incremental optimization of specific information
flows. There is no single path or blueprint for overall integration, but value can be added at
many points simultaneously as individual specific information flows are enabled one at a time.
 This approach is highly flexible and assumes that needs and technology will evolve over time.
Individual systems will come, go, and change. So long as each has the capacity to share
information and adheres to standards for data exchange, evolving requirements for amended
information flows can be met.
Loosely coupled systems
Though it is important not to think of HIS strictly in terms of technology, it is also important to
recognize the potential of appropriate technology as an enabler. If an HIS is defined by the level of
integration among various component systems, then the most critical function technology can provide
is as the means of bridging between these systems. Modern information systems approaches often
refer to this bridging as creating a federation of loosely coupled systems. They are loosely coupled
because they are autonomous systems each designed to support specific activities or functions but have
the capacity to recognize and share information with other systems of different design (and usually
operated by different organizations). The diagram below depicts a hypothetical set of HIS-related
systems in a country and how they might share data through a web services layer through which
systems send and receive requests for data.
Figure 13 – HIS 2.0
Web services is used here as an example but there are multiple technologies and approaches available.
The exact choice of technologies does not matter here. It does not imply that there will never be a
need for a data warehouse, but it does present an alternative. The main distinction is that this concept
moves the thinking of HIS away from the physical integration of data into a separate, standalone data
warehouse, and into a virtual integration of data by enabling a consolidated view of the data across
systems. Still, there are challenges. Diversity among applications and hardware are readily
accommodated, but standard semantics and formats for data interchange are necessary. The semantic
standards may be the most difficult to achieve because it requires people to agree on the meaning and
purpose of a data element, as well as the valid values for a given element. One paper lists over 30
“vocabularies” or terminology sets.217 In the health field these things have been difficult to achieve
because of the complexity of health data and the variety of activities related to health. Format standards
may be a less contentious issue because the discussion as to whether a data element should be
represented as text or a number, or a text field should be 20 characters or 30, is simpler.
Interoperability also will depend on a policy regarding security, access, and data privacy, as these
policies will likely also vary between systems and need to be respected by other systems. But the
opportunity for interoperability might actually be greater in developing countries where data
requirements might be scaled down to an essential minimum. Standardization efforts will also reveal
inconsistencies and data quality issues within a single system. This may prove to be an embarrassment
to that system owner but also be the incentive needed to address the root causes.
This conceptual model also accommodates the reality in most developing countries of multiple
fragmented systems and donor-driven programs where the donor need for reporting drives the
development of program-specific systems, adding to the proliferation of systems performing similar
functions. The data collection is still duplicative but perhaps once there is an easier way to view and
access the data, mindshare will begin to build about the need to coordinate and eliminate redundant
data collection, which might result in the consolidation of some systems and be a welcome outcome to
the overburdened and understaffed public health institutions.
The path to creating a loosely coupled set of systems is still not easy and straightforward, but the
benefit is that resources are focused on data standardization and data quality, rather than on
construction of complex data warehouses and the constant supervision of the data feed process into
the data warehouse.
End Notes
1 All subsequent monetary amounts will be marked with the $ symbol and refer to U.S. dollars, unless otherwise noted.
2Declaration of Alma-Ata International Conference on Primary Health care, Alma-Ata, USSR, 6-12 September 1978 Retrieved from :
http://www.who.int/hpr/NPH/docs/declaration_almaata.pdf 1/12/09.
3 http://www.who.int/healthmetrics/about/en/.
4 Health Metrics Network, Framework and Standards for Country Health Information Systems, sec. 1.1.1., W.H.O. 200?
5 Ibid., Introduction, p. 3.
6 Vital Wave Consulting analysis of Baru, Rama V. HEALTH SECTOR REFORM IN SOUTH ASIA: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS.
Retrieved on February 5, 2009 at www.psiru.org/reports/2008-10-H-southasia.doc and World Bank World Development Indicators database,
retrived on February 5, 2009 at www.worldbank.org
7 Sekhri et al. Regulating private health insurance to serve the public interest: policy issues for developing countries. The International
journal of health planning and management (2006) vol. 21 (4) pp. 357-92.
8World Bank. Health Insurance Project. Project ID: P101852 ,6/14/07.
http://web.worldbank.org/external/projects/main?menuPK=228424&pagePK=64283627&piPK=73230&theSitePK=40941&Projectid
=P101852.
9 Smith et al. Healthy Bodies and Thick Wallets: The Dual Relation Between Health and Economic Status. Journal of Economic
Perspectives (1999) vol. 13 (2) pp. 145-166; Bygbjerg et al. Global transition in health. Danish medical bulletin (2007) vol. 54 (1) pp. 44-5 -
------ Beaglehole et al. Improving the prevention and management of chronic disease in low-income and middle-income countries: a
priority for primary health care. Lancet (2008) vol. 372 (9642) pp. 940-9 ------ Maire et al. Transition nutritionnelle et maladies chroniques
non transmissibles liées à l'alimentation dans les pays en développement. Santé (2002) vol. 12 (1) pp. 45-55 ------- Boutayeb. The double
burden of communicable and non-communicable diseases in developing countries. Trans R Soc Trop Med Hyg (2006) vol. 100 (3) pp.
191-9).
10 See India case study on page 34.
11 Mullan. The metrics of the physician brain drain. N Engl J Med (2005) vol. 353 (17) pp. 1810-8.
12 See the respective case study or snapshot.
13 Murray, Christopher et. al., Validity of Reported Vaccination Coverage in 45 Countries, The Lancet, Vol. 362, No. 9389, pp. 1022-7.
14 See Zambia case study on page 45.
15 See Sao Paulo case study on page 38.
16 Rosen et al. Patient retention in antiretroviral therapy programs in sub-Saharan Africa: a systematic review. PLoS Med (2007) vol. 4 (10)
pp. e298
17 Fraser et al. Information systems for patient follow-up and chronic management of HIV and tuberculosis: a life-saving technology in
resource-poor areas. J Med Internet Res (2007) vol. 9 (4) pp. e29. For the impact of the use of electronic patient record management on
patient outcomes, see, for example, Stringer, Jeffrey S.A. 2006. Rapid Scale-up of Antiretroviral Therapy at Primary Care Sites in Zambia.
Journal of the American Medical Association. 296:782-793.
18 Martínez et al. A study of a rural telemedicine system in the Amazon region of Peru. Journal of telemedicine and telecare (2004) vol. 10
(4) pp. 219-25

19 Martínez et al. An economic analysis of the EHAS telemedicine system in Alto Amazonas. Journal of telemedicine and telecare (2007)
vol. 13 (1) pp. 7-14

20 Heinzelmann et al. Telemedicine by email in remote Cambodia. Journal of telemedicine and telecare (2005) vol. 11 Suppl 2 pp. S44-7
21 Fraser et al. Evaluating the impact and costs of deploying an electronic medical record system to support TB treatment in Peru. AMIA
Annual Symposium proceedings / AMIA Symposium AMIA Symposium (2006) pp. 264-8
22 Turhan et al. Implementation of a Virtual Private Network-Based Laboratory Information System Serving a Rural Area in Turkey.
Laboratory Medicine (2006) vol. 37 (9) pp. 527-531

23 Yamanija et al. Comparing actual medication consumption against the quantities ordered and a prediction using an information system.
Int J Tuber Lung Dis 2006;10(11 Suppl. 1):S69-S70.

24These countries include Bangladesh, Belize, China, Ethiopia, Ghana, Haiti, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, Mozambique, Peru, Rwanda,
Sierra Leone, South Africa, Uganda, and Vietnam
Page 106 • End Notes Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009

25 Weddi, Davis. Using information systems to manage health in Uganda. International Institute for Comunication and Development.
August 2006. p. 2-3. Retrieved on January 23, 2009 from www.ftpiicd.org/iconnect/ICT4D_Health/HMISUganda.pdf. See the Uganda
country snapshot for more information and sources.
26 See, for example, A Pragmatic Approach to Constructing a Minimum Data Set for Care of Patients with HIV in Developing Countries;
William M. Tierney, Md, Eduard J. Beck, Mbbs, Phd, Reed M. Gardner, Phd, Beverly Musick, Ms, Mark Shields, Md, Mph, Ms, Naomi M.
Shiyonga, Mark H. Spohr, Md.; Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association Volume 13 Number 3 May / Jun 2006.
27 Rohde, Jon E. “Redressing Health Disparities with Information.” Equity Project. 9th World Congress on Health Information and
Libraries. September 2005. Retrieved at http://www.icml9.org/program/public/documents/JonRhode-113844.pdf

28 DHIS is the District Health Information System was first developed in South Africa as a collection mechanism and repository for basic
health district indicators. As an open source project with version 2.0 it has expanded to include other functions and has been deployed
widely throughout sub-Saharan Africa. See
http://208.76.222.114/confluence/display/HISP/Health+Information+Systems+Programme
29 http://openmrs.org/wiki/OpenMRS
30 http://www.baobabhealth.org/
31 http://inveneo.org/
32 Electronic Medical Records - Asia gets ready. Asian Hospital and Health care Management Retrieved on December 12, 2008.
http://www.asianhhm.com/Knowledge_bank/interviews/emr_ragam_ibm.htm
33 See the description of several projects undertaken by AED Satellife at http://pda.healthnet.org/handheld-projects.html.
34 See http://www.clickdiagnostics.com for more information.
35 Health Metrics Network Biennial Report 2005/2006. Revised edition, August 2007. P. 3. Retrieved on January 28, 2009 from
http://www.who.int/entity/healthmetrics/governance/HMN_biennal_report.pdf.
36Stringer, Jeffrey S.A. 2006. Rapid Scale-up of Antiretroviral Therapy at Primary Care Sites in Zambia. Journal of the American Medical
Association. 296:782-793.
37 Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. (January 2008). Monitoring of Information and Evaluation System (MIES). Retrieved on
January 29, 2009 at http://nrhm-mis.nic.in/MEActivities.aspx

38United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. (2004). Urban and Rural Areas 2003. United Nations.
Retrieved on January 29, 2009 at http://www.geohive.com/earth/pop_urban.aspx
39World Health Organization. (2007).India National Health System Profile, World Health Organization. p. 10. Retrieved on January 29,
2009 at http://www.searo.who.int/LinkFiles/India_CHP_india.pdf
40 The Economist. (11 December 2008). Creaking, Groaning: A Special Report on India. The Economist. Retrieved on January 29, 2009 at
http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12749787
41 Provided by Sao Paulo City Department of Health, IT Unit.
42Costa, G. A. , Leao, B.F, & Moura Jr., L.A. (June 2008). Sao Paulo City Health Information System – A Case Report. MedInfo 2007:
Proceedings of the 12th World Congress on Health (Medical) Informatics; Building Sustainable Health Systems. 2007. Retrieved from
http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=784484762660240;res=IELHSS
43 World Bank Global Development Indicators.
44 All subsequent monetary amounts will be marked with the $ symbol and refer to US dollars, unless otherwise noted.
45 World Bank, World Development Indicators, 2004. Retrieved on January 28, 2008 from www.worldbank.org
46 Mark Shields personal communication to Ben Chirwa, Director General at Zambia’s Central Board of Health, April 24, 2004.
47 Commonwealth Health Ministers Reference Book. 2008. Zambia E-Health Survey.
48 Personal communication from Marcus Achiume, CIDRZ Chief Information Officer.
49 Although the CDC formally applies to PEPFAR for funding, both are part of the US Government, and informants have argued this
structure weakens arm’s length accountabilities that should exist between funder and implementer.
50 Lohr, S. Health care that Puts a Computer on the Team. December 27, 2008.The New York Times. The New York Times.

51 Standard indicators are promoted by WHO, but these are probably still too numerous and are not followed by funders. See, for
example, http://www.who.int/reproductive_indicators/definitionofindicators.asp, which provides a reference list of definitions for 53

indicators for reproductive health only.
52 Krickeberg, K.(2007).Principles of Health Information Systems in Developing Countries, Health Information Management Journal.
LaTrobe University, 36 (3).

53 “WHO - Country Cooperation Strategy 2008–2013 – Bangladesh,” World Health Organization, Country Office for Bangladesh, p. 18.
Last accessed on January 15th, 2009, at http://www.whoban.org/pdf/Final%20CCS%20-Bangladesh.pdf

54 “National Health Policy – An Update”, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh,
August 2008, p.10. Last accessed on January 15th, 2009, at http://www.mohfw.gov.bd/New_Folder/Health%20Policy_english.pdf

55“Essential Services Package,” Urban Family Health Partnership (UFHP), Website content. Last accessed on January 15th, 2009, at
http://ufhp.jsi.com/
56 “WHO - Country Cooperation Strategy 2008–2013 – Bangladesh,” World Health Organization, Country Office for
Bangladesh, p. 18. Last accessed on January 15th, 2009, at http://www.whoban.org/pdf/Final%20CCS%20-

Bangladesh.pdf .
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid.
59F. Sobhan, M. Shafiullah, Z. Hossain, M. Chowdhury. “Study of eGovernment in Bangladesh.” Bangladesh Enterprise Institution. April
2004, pp.29-31. Last accessed on January 15th, 2009, at http://www.bei-bd.org/docs/egov1.pdf
60 The Commonwealth Health Ministers Book 2008. Country Surveys, Bangladesh, pp. 2-3.
61 Ibid, p.1.
62 Ibid.
63 http://www.governmentofbelize.gov.bz/press_release_details.php?pr_id=5134
64 Interview with Accesstec official, November 30, 2008.
65 Ibid.
66 http://www.who.int/healthmetrics/news/blzpress160908/en/index.html
67HIT Briefing Book, Health Information Technology and Policy Lab, The National Bureau of Asian Research, 2007, p.50. Last accessed
on January 15th, 2008 at http://www.pacifichealthsummit.org/downloads/HITCaseStudies/HIT_2007.pdf
68“Guidelines for Development of National Health Informatics (2003—2010),” Ministry of Health of People’s Republic of China,
Beijing. [2005-05-26]. Last accessed in Chinese, on January 16th, 2009 at
http://www.moh.gov.cn/uploadfile/200406/2004629144259379.doc
69Wang Jiu, Xu Yong-yong, Liu Dan-hong. “Problems and Prospects of Hospital Information System in China,” Journal of US -China
Medical Science, 4, (1) (Serial No. 26). 79. Last accessed on January 15th, 2008 at
http://www.doctors.org.cn/doc/ucmed200701/ucmed20060716.pdf
70 Wang Jiu, Xu Yong-yong, Liu Dan-hong, p. 77.
71 Ibid.
72 Ibid, p. 76.
73 Ibid., pp.77-79.
74 HIT Briefing Book, p. 101.
75 Ibid, p. 104.
76 Ibid, p. 102.
77“China Health Information System: Review and Assessment”, Health Metrics Network, WHO, December 2006. pp. 3-4. Last accessed
on January 15th, 2008 at http://www.who.int/entity/healthmetrics/library/countries/hmn_chn_his_2007_en.pdf
78 Health Metrics Network, p. 8.

79 Health Metrics Network, p. 7.
80“Essential Health Services Package for Ethiopia,” Federal Ministry of Health, August 2005, p.3. Last accessed on January 9, 2009 at
http://www.moh.gov.et/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=47&func=fileinfo&id=184
81 Ibid, p.8.
82“Assessment of the Ethiopian National Health Information System,” Final Report , HMN-WHO, 2007 . Last accessed on January 12,
2009 at http://www.who.int/healthmetrics/library/countries/hmn_eth_his_2007_en.pdf
83 Ibid, p.4
84 Assessment of the Ethiopian National Health Information System, p. 4
85 Emmanuel Adjei , "Health Sector Reform and Health Information in Ghana", Information Development 2003; 19; 2561; p. 256
86 Ibid, p. 257-258
87 “Independent Review – Health Sector Program of Work 2007”, Draft Report – April 2008, Ministry of Health, Ghana, p.54-55; Last
accessed on Jan. 7th, 2009 at http://www.moh-

ghana.org/moh/docs/reports_pub/annual_Reviews_reports/Annual%20Independent%20Review%20Report%202007%20(Draft).pdf
88 Ibid, p. 260-262
89Ghana Health Service, Annual Report 2007, p.68. Last accessed on Jan.6th, 2009 at
http://www.ghanahealthservice.org/includes/upload/publications/GHS%202007%20Annual%20Report.pdf
90“Ghana Health Information System: National Level Review and Assessment Report”, HMN, November 2006, p. 27;
http://www.moh-ghana.org/moh/docs/hmn_act/National%20HIS%20Assessment%20Report.doc
91Ghana Health Service, Annual Report 2007, p.68. Last accessed on Jan.6th, 2009 at
http://www.ghanahealthservice.org/includes/upload/publications/GHS%202007%20Annual%20Report.pdf
92 Ibid, p. 68
93 Ibid, p. 68
94 “Ghana Health Information System: National Level Review and Assessment Report”, HMN, November 2006, p. 24;
http://www.moh-ghana.org/moh/docs/hmn_act/National%20HIS%20Assessment%20Report.doc
95 “Haiti - Profile of the Health Services System”, Program on Organization and Management of Health Systems and Service, Division of
Health Systems and Services Development. Pan American Health Organization. ”, Second Edition, July 2003.
p.2. Last accessed on January 20th, 2008 at www.lachealthsys.org/documents/healthsystemprofileofhaiti-EN.pdf
96“Strategic Plan for Health Sector Reform”, Ministry of Public Health and Population, Haiti, March 2004. p.4-12. Last accessed on
January 20th, 2008 at http://www.lachealthsys.org/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_download&gid=203
97 “Haiti - Profile of the Health Services System”, Program on Organization and Management of Health Systems and Service, Division of
Health Systems and Services Development. Pan American Health Organization. ”, Second Edition, July 2003.
p.10. Last accessed on January 20th, 2008 at www.lachealthsys.org/documents/healthsystemprofileofhaiti-EN.pdf
98 Ibid. p.54-57.
99“Health in the Americas, 2007, Volume II-Countries”, Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), 2007. p.422. Last accessed on
January 20th, 2008 at http://www.paho.org/hia/archivosvol2/paisesing/Haiti%20English.pdf
100 William B. Lober, Christina Quiles, Steve Wagner, Rachelle Cassagnol , Roges Lamothes, Don Rock Pierre Alexis, Patrice Joseph, Perri
Sutton, Nancy Puttkammer, Mari M. Kitahata, “Three Years Experience with the Implementation of a
Networked Electronic Medical Record in Haiti.” AMIA 2008 Symposium Proceedings. p.434.
101 Ibid. p.435-437.
102 http://model.pih.org/book/export/html/529
103“11 health questions about the 11 SEAR countries”, WHO, 2007 The National Bureau of Asian Research, 2007. , p.126. Last accessed
on January 16th, 2008 at http://www.searo.who.int/LinkFiles/Country_Health_System_Profile_5-indonesia.pdf
104 “Hospital Claim is Responsibility of PT. ASKES”, Departamen Kesehatan, Republik of Indonesia, March 27, 2007. Last accessed on
January 16th, 2008 at http://www.depkes.go.id/en/2703ho.htm

105Robert Sparrow , Asep Suryahadi and Wenefrida Widyanti , “Public Health Insurance for the Poor in Indonesia: Targeting and Impact
of Indonesia’s Askeskin Programme”, Paper prepared for the ABCDE, June 2008, Cape Town, South Africa. p.6. Last accessed on
January 16th, 2008 at http://campus.iss.nl/~grimm/ABCDE%20Session%2011_Paper_Suryahadi_etal.pdf
106“Review of health information systems (HIS) in selected countries - Indonesia”. WHO, April 2005 p.8. Last accessed on January 16th,
2008 at http://www.who.int/healthmetrics/indonesia_05apr.pdf
107Health
System, Health Profile, WHO Indonesia. December. 2008. Webpage. Last accessed on January 16th, 2008 at
http://www.ino.searo.who.int/EN/Section3_24.htm
108 Dr. Bambang Hartono, “Development of Online Health Information System in Indonesia”, Ministry of Health, Jakarta, 2008.
http://www.ifhrosear2008.org/papers/23%200CT%20-%20DAY%203/SESSION%204/Bambang%20hartono%20-
%20DEVELOPMENT%20OF%20HIS%20IN%20INDONESIA%20%5BCompatibility%20Mode%5D.pdf
109 Ibid
110Lutfan Lazuardi, Anis Fuad, Hari Kusnanto, “The role of FOSS for Health Information Systems: Case study in Wonosobo
District, Indonesia”. Graduate Program of Public Health Faculty of Medicine Gadjah Mada University Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
Presentation at International Conference on Open Software in Health care. Pulau Pinang Malaysia November 2008. Last accessed on
January 16th, 2008 at http://bpio.amdi.usm.edu.my/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=bxbBYyiYMTs%3d&tabid=1085&language=en-US
111 REPUBLIC OF KENYA. (June 2008). Ministry of Health Annual Health Sector Status Report 2005-2007. p. vii. Retrieved on
January 30, 2009 from http://www.health.go.ke/Healthfacilities/Annual%20Report%20_%20HMIS.pdf.

112 REPUBLIC OF KENYA. (August 2006). Health Management Information Systems. P. 2. Retrieved on January 30, 2009 from
http://www.health.go.ke/hmisf/hmis1.pdf.
113 REPUBLIC OF KENYA. (June 2008). Ministry of Health Annual Health Sector Status Report 2005-2007. p. 76.
114 REPUBLIC OF KENYA. (June 2008). Ministry of Health Annual Health Sector Status Report 2005-2007. p. ix.
115 Ibid.
118 REPUBLIC OF KENYA. (June 2008). Ministry of Health Annual Health Sector Status Report 2005-2007. p. 14-15.
119 REPUBLIC OF KENYA. (August 2006). Health Management Information Systems. P. 2.
120Kibet, Dr. Sergon et al. (June 2008). Report of the Assessment of the Health Information System of Kenya. P. 5. Retrieved on January
31, 2009 from http://www.health.go.ke/Healthfacilities/HIS%20Assessment%20final%20report%2030.05.08.pdf.
121 Ibid.
122 Kibet, Dr. Sergon et al. (June 2008). Report of the Assessment of the Health Information System of Kenya. P. 4.
123 REPUBLIC OF KENYA. (June 2008). Ministry of Health Annual Health Sector Status Report 2005-2007. p. viii.
124 Kibet, Dr. Sergon et al. (June 2008). Report of the Assessment of the Health Information System of Kenya. P. 5.
[c] REPUBLIC OF KENYA. (June 2008). Ministry of Health Annual Health Sector Status Report 2005-2007. p. 15-16, 18.
125World Health Organization, Health Metrics Network. “Review of health information systems in selected countries: Mexico”, Geneva.
www.who.int/entity/healthmetrics/library/, p. 3
126 Ibid. p. 4
127 Ibid. p. 9
128 Ibid. p. 10
129 Ibid. p. 12-14
130Mabunda et al. A country-wide malaria survey in Mozambique. I. Plasmodium falciparum infection in children in different
epidemiological settings. Malar J (2008) vol. 7 pp. 216
131WHO HIV/AIDS Epidemiological Fact Sheet (Accessed 2/1/2009):
http://www.who.int/globalatlas/predefinedReports/EFS2008/short/EFSCountryProfiles2008_MZ.pdf

132 Assessment of Epidemiological Disease Surveillance system in Mozambique (Accessed 1/31/2009):
www.who.int/entity/hac/crises/moz/sitreps/mozambique_epi_surv_nov_dec2006.pdf
133 Piotti et al. Public health care in Mozambique: strategic issues in the ICT development during managerial changes and public reforms.
International journal of medical informatics (2007) vol. 76 Suppl 1 pp. S184-95

134 Republic of Mozambique. Action Plan for the Reduction of Absolute Poverty, 2006-2009 (PARPA II) (Accessed 1/31/2009):
http://www.who.int/countries/moz/publications/parpa2/en/index.html
135 Piotti et al. Public health care in Mozambique: strategic issues in the ICT development during managerial changes and public reforms.
International journal of medical informatics (2007) vol. 76 Suppl 1 pp. S184-95

136 Ibid
Assessment of Epidemiological Disease Surveillance system in Mozambique (Accessed 1/31/2009):
137
www.who.int/entity/hac/crises/moz/sitreps/mozambique_epi_surv_nov_dec2006.pdf
138 Ibid
139 Piotti et al.
140Mozambique MoH Integration Report (Accessed 1/31/2009):
http://www.misau.gov.mz/pt/content/download/2376/13024/file/IntegrationReportBack.xls
PDAs for Malaria Monitoring in Maputo and Gaza Provinces (Accessed 1/31/2009): http://www.idrc.ca/en/ev-116808-201-1-
141
DO_TOPIC.html
142 Mozambique Health Information Network (Accessed 1/31/2009): http://www.idrc.ca/acacia/ev-116198-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html
143Mozambique MOH. Strategic Plan for the Health Sector (2001-2005-2010) (Accessed 2/1/2009):
http://www.usaid.gov/mz/doc/plan/mh_stratplan_2010.pdf
144 Curioso, Walter. “eHealth in Peru: a Country Case Study”, Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia. August 2008. p. 12.
145 Ibid, p. 12.
146 Ibid, p.12.
Chretien, Jean-Paul, David Blazes, Cecilia Mundaca, Jonathan Glass, et al. “Surveillance for Emerging Infection Epidemics in
147
Developing Countries: EWORS and Alerta DISAMAR.” In Disease Surveillance: A Public Health Informatics Approach, edited by Joseph S.
Lombardo and David L. Buckeridge, 367-396. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2007. p. 381.
148 Ernesto Bozzer et al, “Information technology for capacity building in public health: The case of Alerta DISAMAR an innovative
disease surveillance system” (poster presented at The XI Public Health World Congress, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, August 20-21, 2006).
149 Walter Curioso, p. 13 and Jean-Paul Chretien, p. 381.
150 Walter Curioso, p. 23.
151 Ibid, p. 8.
152 Ibid. p. 29. See also: Ministerio de Salud – Comisión Multisectorial (MINSA – Comisión Multisectorial, 2008). Final report on PDF
available at: http://www.minsa.gob.pe/portal/sns/default.asp

153 2007 Rwandan MOH/USAID Service Provision Assessment. Accessed 1/29/2009, available from
http://www.measuredhs.com/pubs/pub_details.cfm?ID=859&ctry_id=35&SrchTp=ctry&flag=sur Logie et al. Innovations in Rwanda's

health system: looking to the future. Lancet (2008) vol. 372 (9634) pp. 256-61
154 UN AIDS Country Responses, Rwanda. Accessed 1/29/2009, available from
http://www.unaids.org/en/CountryResponses/Countries/rwanda.asp
155United Nations Development Programme and Government of Rwanda. Turning Vision 2020 into reality. From recovery to sustainable
human development. National Human Development Report. United Nations Development Programme and Government of Rwanda,
2007.
156 WHO Mortality Fact Sheet, Rwanda (Accessed 1/28/09): http://www.who.int/whosis/mort/profiles/mort_afro_rwa_rwanda.pdf
157Rwanda MOH Health Sector Strategic Plan 2005-2009 (Accessed 1/28/09, may need to use Google’s cached version due to
intermittent availability of MOH website): http://www.moh.gov.rw/docs/pdf/strategic_plan.PDF

158 2007 Rwandan MOH/USAID Service Provision Assessment. Accessed 1/29/2009, available from
http://www.measuredhs.com/pubs/pub_details.cfm?ID=859&ctry_id=35&SrchTp=ctry&flag=sur
159 Kalk. Rwanda's health system: some concerns. Lancet (2008) vol. 372 (9651) pp. 1729; author reply 1729-30
160 Rwanda MOH Health Sector Strategic Plan 2005-2009 (Accessed 1/28/09, may need to use Google’s cached version due to
intermittent availability of MOH website): http://www.moh.gov.rw/docs/pdf/strategic_plan.PDF
161USAID, RTI International, Rwanda MoH. Rwanda HMIS Assessment Report. Accessed 1/27/09, available from
htp://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PNADG504.pdf
162 Ibid
163 Ibid
164 Ibid
165 Ibid
166Report on an Assessment of the Sierra Leonean Health Information System (Accessed 1/28/2009):
http://www.who.int/entity/healthmetrics/library/countries/hmn_sle_his_2007_en.pdf
167 WHO Country Cooperation Report, Sierra Leone (Accessed 1/29/2009):
http://www.who.int/countryfocus/cooperation_strategy/ccs_sle_en.pdf
168WHO Onchocerciasis Control Programme (Accessed 1/29/2009):
http://www.who.int/blindness/partnerships/onchocerciasis_OCP/en/
169 Report on an Assessment of the Sierra Leonean Health Information System (Accessed 1/28/2009):
170 Ibid
171The World Bank Group: Doing Business in Sierra Leone (Accessed 1/30/2009):
http://www.doingbusiness.org/ExploreEconomies/?economyid=166
172The World Bank World Development Indicators database, Sierra Leone (Accessed 1/30/2009):
http://go.worldbank.org/1SF48T40L0
173 Report on an Assessment of the Sierra Leonean Health Information System (Accessed 1/28/2009):
174Lubinski. Presentation at 11th STI Symposium, 22 April 2008, Accessed 1/30/2009:
http://www.sti.ch/fileadmin/user_upload/David%20Lubinski,%2011%20STI%20Symposium%202008_healthmetricsnetwork.pdf
175 Inveneo ICTs for health care come to Sierra Leone (Accessed 1/30/2009): http://www.inveneo.org/?q=newsfeed/sierra-leone/
176 ScienceDaily, 11/12/2008. Sierra Leone: Collecting Health Data In Areas With No Power Supply (Accessed 1/30/2009):
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081112074912.htm
177WHO Sierra Leone's Health Information System Revitalized. Retrieved from
http://www.who.int/healthmetrics/news/slepress080808/en/index.html
178 Kabbia. Sierra Leone: Health Minister On the Revitalized District Health Information System (Accessed 1/30/2009):
http://allafrica.com/stories/200808111418.html
179Mars, Maurice MD and Seebregts, C. PhD. (July 2008). Country Case Study for eHealth South Africa. P. 33. Retrieved on February 1,
2009 from http://www.ehealth-connection.org/files/resources/County%20Case%20Study%20for%20eHealth%20South%20Africa.pdf.
180 Ibid, p. 3.
181 Ibid, p. 33.
182 Ibid, p. 15.
183 http://www.hisp.org. Accessed on February 1, 2009.
184Garrib, A. et al. (July 2008). An Evaluation of the District Health Information System in rural South Africa. South African Medical
Journal, Vol. 98, No. 7, p. 550. Retrieved on February 1, 2009 from
http://www.africacentre.ac.za/Portals/0/Publications/2008_An%20evaluation%20of%20the%20district%20health%20information%20s
ystem%20in%20rural%20south%20africa_SAMJ.pdf.

185 Ibid, p. 550.
186 Mars, Maurice MD and Seebregts, C. PhD. p. 9.
187 Ibid, p. 23.
188 Ibid, p. 37-38.
189 Ibid, p. 26.
190 Ibid, p. 14.
191 Ibid, pp. 4, 28.
192Republic of Uganda, Ministry of Health. Health Sector Strategic Plan, 2005/06 – 2009/10.
(http://www.who.int/rpc/evipnet/Health%20Sector%20Strategic%20Plan%20II%202009-2010.pdf)
193 Weddi, Davis. Using information systems to manage health in Uganda. International Institute for Communication and Development.
August 2006. p. 1. Retrieved on January 23, 2009 from www.ftpiicd.org/iconnect/ICT4D_Health/HMISUganda.pdf.

194 See the screen shots and tour of the system at http://www.ugandadish.org/Index.htm. EPI Info was originally developed by the CDC
and is public domain. See http://www.cdc.gov/epiinfo/ for more information.

195 Weddi, p. 3.
196Health Metrics Network, Assessment of the Health Information System in Uganda, June 2007, p. 14. Retrieved on January 23, 2009
from http://www.who.int/entity/healthmetrics/library/countries/hmn_uga_his_2007_en.pdf.
197 http://pda.healthnet.org/
198Vietnam – Country Health Information Profiles, WHO 2007, p. 485. Last accessed on January 15th, 2008 at
http://www.wpro.who.int/NR/rdonlyres/DFBC5060-C561-49D4-A8D1-B66071DE1E46/0/40VietNam08.pdf
199 Viet Nam Health Information System - Review and Assessment, Health Metrics Network, December 2006, p. 14. Last accessed on
January 15th, 2008 at http://www.who.int/entity/healthmetrics/library/countries/hmn_vnm_his_2007_en.pdf.

200 Ibid.
201 Ibid.
202HIT Briefing Book, Health Information Technology and Policy Lab, The National Bureau of Asian Research, 2007, p.94. Last accessed
on January 15th, 2008 at http://www.pacifichealthsummit.org/downloads/HITCaseStudies/HIT_2007.pdf.
203 Susan J. Adams, “Vietnam’s Health care System: A Macroeconomic Perspective,” Paper Prepared for the International Symposium on
Health care Systems in Asia, Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo. January 21-22, 2005, p. 13-15. Last accessed on January 15th, 2008 at
http://www.imf.org/external/country/vnm/rr/sp/012105.pdf
204 HIT Briefing Book, p. 94.
205 Ibid, p. 93.
206 Ibid, p. 96.
207 Ibid.
208 Viet Nam Health Information System - Review and Assessment, Health Metrics Network, December 2006, p. 10.
209 Ibid, p. 93
210 Viet Nam Health Information System - Review and Assessment, Health Metrics Network, December 2006, p. 52.
211 Ibid.
212Kaplinsky, Raphael and Mike Morris. (November 2001). A Handbook for Value Chain Research. Report prepared for the IDRC, p.
53. Retrieved on December 12, 2008 from http://www.bdsknowledge.org/dyn/bds/docs/detail/395/1.
213Campbell, Ruth. (January 2008). The Value Chain Framework Briefing Paper. USAID. Retrieved on December 15, 2008 from
http://www.microlinks.org/ev_en.php?ID=21629_201&ID2=DO_TOPIC.
214http://www.chicagofed.org/news_and_conferences/conferences_and_events/research_conferences_past.cfm. A summary of the
2007 conference is available at http://www.chicagofed.org/publications/fedletter/cflmarch2008_248.pdf. The agenda including links to

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Research Paper & Strategic Briefing

Health Information Systems in

Page 0 • / Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009

Page 1 • Contents Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009

Page 2 • Acknowledgements Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009

Page 3 • Acknowledgements Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009

Page 4 • Acknowledgements Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009

Health Care Trends shaping national health information systems today

Page 5 • Executive Summary Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009

‘First generation’ HIS

• They function in the public sector and often only

Organizations such as the Health Metrics Network have

Page 6 • Executive Summary Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009

Movement toward a ‘second generation’ HIS in developing countries

Stage 1 Stage 2 Stage 3 Stage 4 Stage 5

Page 7 • Executive Summary Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009

• Better information management tools at the local level.

Case studies illustrate different approaches for different goals

Case Study Region Income Level Scale Scope

National, Core health and

Brazil Citywide, Resource allocation,

Page 8 • Executive Summary Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009

Sao Paulo, Brazil India Zambia

Featured HIS Initiative: Featured HIS Initiative: Featured HIS Initiative:

Page 9 • Executive Summary Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009

• Drive consensus adoption of a minimum set of essential indicators

• Enhance HIS success rates by supporting initiatives that have high-level

Page 10 • Executive Summary Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009

This document considers several aspects of health

Page 11 • Introduction Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009

Secondary research countries

Countries included in secondary research were chosen to represent a cross-section of low-income

1. Asia , including Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam;

Primary research countries

Case Study Region Income Level Scale Scope

National, Core health and

Brazil Citywide, Resource allocation,

Page 12 • Introduction Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009

Data warehouse is a repository of an organization’s electronically stored data. In addition

Page 13 • Introduction Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009

A health information system (HIS) refers to any organized effort to systematically

Metadata is definitional data that provides information about or documentation of other

Microdata refers to data relating to an individual which is not, however, uniquely

Page 14 • Introduction Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009

Decentralization and the Importance of Health Information

Trends Shaping the Idea of a National Health Information

Page 15 • Landscape Overview Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009

Page 16 • Landscape Overview Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009

 Developments in medical technology enhance treatment but require improved

Page 17 • Landscape Overview Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009

Reconsidering the Definition of HIS

Page 18 • Landscape Overview Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009

Characterization of first generation HIS

The data in such systems

Observed shortcomings of first generation HIS

These systems have a number of common traits:

Page 19 • Landscape Overview Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009

Page 20 • Landscape Overview Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009

The need for a new concept of HIS

Page 21 • Landscape Overview Vital Wave Consulting HIS © 2009