Each quarter, Digital Square shines the spotlight on global goods and innovators in our community through our Global Goods Community Newsletter. This interview was first shared in May 2019.
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In the last three years, global digital health has grown from a small community into an integrated and high-priority part of the agenda for Sustainable Development Goal 3: ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for all. With its growing visibility, fractures within the community have also become increasingly visible. Investments aren’t just fragmented because people aren’t aware of each other; they are also fragmented because people fundamentally disagree on how to achieve digital transformation of health systems in low-resource settings.
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Civil registration is critical for human rights and effective governance. Globally, almost half of the world’s children, most of them in Africa, do not have their birth registered and are consequently invisible in the eyes of the law. Being Invisible, they are vulnerable to many forms of abuse and neglect. They may also be unable to access health services because their governments do not know they exist. It is not only births that go uncounted, around two-thirds of all deaths currently go unregistered, leaving the details of death unknown and potential responses to their causes impossible.
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Earlier this year, we shared our work on OpenMRS Sync 2.0. Here is an update on our continued work!
OpenMRS is a patient-centric medical record application that documents the details of interactions between health care providers and patients. The software gathers a patient’s treatment details into a single patient chart. The Sync 2.0 module improves the synchronization of data by providing a way for health workers to manually sync their data at a central office. As a long-time contributor to the OpenMRS community, SolDevelo saw the importance of these features. We began developing Sync 2.0 as a pro bono effort before pursuing funding through Digital Square. SolDevelo worked as the main coders on this software module.
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Recently, the use of DHIS2 by several Ministries of Health, global health and development organizations to collect, manage and visualize routine program data has reached a new level of sophistication, with many countries using DHIS2 at national scale on several health areas and with increased data granularity. This has required more sophisticated and robust data use for adaptive program management, and data users are demanding more advanced analytics capabilities beyond DHIS2’s core functionality
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Maps are an important visualization tool. They translate information from values and text fields into something we can grasp more quickly. Throughout the global health sector, maps are being used to bring transparency to data sets in new ways—and to help foster coordination in delivering effective health programs.
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Jean Mory Millimono sits in an office at the Regional Health Directorate in Faranah, Guinea. As a Statistics Manager, Jean works with data to better understand the health of more than 900,000 people in his region. He uses the data available to him through Guinea’s health information management system—District Health Information System 2 (DHIS2)—to better understand the health services and needs of these communities. However, until recently, data in DHIS2 could only be analyzed at the regional, district, and health facility level, keeping Jean and his counterparts in other subdistricts from effectively monitoring health indicators and comparing the performance of facilities within the same municipality.
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The Global Goods Guidebook is the newest addition to the resources supporting greater collaboration in the digital health sector.
Digital health is experiencing unprecedented growth in coordination and collaboration. Governments, funders, technology experts, and implementers, are working together in new and innovative ways. Collaboration requires shared language, shared values, and a shared vision. Many of these were codified in 2015 with the Principles of Digital Development—a set of nine principles that guide our actions and partnerships. Then last year, donors endorsed a set of Digital Investment Principles. The Digital Investment Principles describe the role investors have in promoting scalable, sustainable, accessible, interoperable, and evidence-based digital health systems. Both sets of principles have rallied stakeholders around our shared responsibility to help countries meet their digital health needs.
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Digital health continues to change the way health systems reach communities around the world. However, when internet connectivity is limited or intermittent, health workers do not reap the full benefits of digital tools. This is a barrier that SolDevelo is working to remove. Last year, SolDevelo began working on a new module for the Open Medical Record System (OpenMRS), an open source medical records platform.
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Nearly a decade ago, the global community that uses District Health Information System 2 (DHIS2) began reaching out to one another in forums and email chains to work through complex problems. They wanted to know if others had encountered a challenge, and, if so, how they solved it. Could they avoid “reinventing the wheel”? What lessons could be learned from the experience of others and could they apply them to their challenge?
Everyone was longing for one central place to connect with each other—to find relevant resources, share user stories and solutions, and ask for support…
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Digital Square is pleased to announce that nine proposals were selected for investment as part of our third round of funding, Notice C, which included two announcements, Notice C0 and Notice C1. A total of $1.26 million is being invested into these digital health software tools by multiple donors. One of these donors, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), committed a total of $151,827 to coinvest alongside Digital Square’s funding for Notice C1. Notice C was implemented using Digital Square’s Open Proposal Process and Platform (OPP&P). Concept notes and proposals were publicly posted, giving submitters the opportunity to find collaborators and provide and receive feedback from peers. The iterative feedback and proposal process allowed submitters to refine and strengthen their concepts before final submission. More information on our proposal process can be found here.
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Officers at the Guinean Ministry of Health’s Bureau of Strategy and Development participate in an interactive workshop. Photo: Digital Square
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The latest release of the OpenLMIS software, version 3.3, is a major accomplishment for the Initiative and for immunization stakeholders globally.
This release is the result of collaboration across organizations and countries to imagine, define, and build standards-based software that truly meets the needs of immunization programs and helps make life saving vaccines available when and where they’re most needed.
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