Desktop Versions of HR Information System Software Released

New non-Internet dependent (offline) versions of the Capacity Project’s iHRIS Manage and iHRIS Qualify software programs have been publicly released on the Project’s HRIS Strengthening website. iHRIS Manage is a human resources (HR) management system and iHRIS Qualify is a training, certification and licensure tracking database. The offline version of iHRIS is intended to be used in locations where Internet access is unavailable or very slow. It can be installed on a Windows computer without requiring a server and supports decentralizing HR information management. Data from the offline version may be made available for the central server-based version of either iHRIS Manage or iHRIS Qualify using a data import and export feature. Offline iHRIS Manage will be piloted and tested in several Rwanda districts over the next few months.

Posted by Shannon Turlington on 6/27/2008 • Tags: News, Releases, iHRIS

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Business Week on OLPC: The challenges of implementation

An article in the June 5, 2008, issue of Business Week addresses some of the challenges faced by the One Laptop Per Child project. Not surprisingly, these are same the challenges that any large-scale technology project in the developing world must overcome.

The article points out that:

• Importing a powerful new tool, like a laptop, into a culture that’s not acclimatized to using it and doesn’t fully understand its capabilities means that many of the tool’s features won’t get used.
• New technology requires ongoing support, and you can’t just delegate support to people in the country, such as teachers, after only 40 hours of training.
• New tools must integrate into communities and support–not contradict–that community’s way of doing things. The community could be the local village, the country, an organization such as a school or hospital, or a governmental system such as the health or educational system.
• You must run a development project like a business; you can’t achieve results when people are spread too thin and you take on too many tasks without a clear plan for executing them.

The article also describes the culture clash that arose within the OLPC project between Open Source advocates and those who wanted to partner with Microsoft. Open Source software is ideal for a project like this, which tries to reduce costs as much as possible, while giving students access to tools, including the software itself. But governments like known entities, and Microsoft is that, especially when it negotiates with governments to reduce software licensing costs.

In summary, executing a massive technology project in the developing world is complicated and has many, many variables, some of them unforeseen. The number of stakeholders involved is enormous. There are many potential points of failure. To succeed, projects must be planned carefully and resourced appropriately, and project implementers must pay attention to more than just the technology. They also have to consider the cultures they’re entering, the systems already in place and the people who will be working with the technology. In other words, it’s not easy executing an ambitious ICT for development project like One Laptop Per Child.

Posted by Shannon Turlington on 6/20/2008 • Tags: ICT4d, Sustainability, Technology

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Join us in D.C.

Next week in Washington, D.C. some of us here in the Informatics group will be attending the 35th Annual International Conference on Global Health.

We’re excited that Pape Gaye, our CEO, will be moderating and presenting a panel on “The Impact of Weak Health Systems on the Health Care Worker Crisis” and hope everyone will take the time to attend. In addition I will be hosting a round table discussion on Global Health Open Source Development and Online Community .Please drop in, join in on the discussion, and say hello. After the roundtable I will make sure to share some of the discussion here so check back in if you aren’t attending.

Posted by David Mason on 5/23/2008 • Tags: Events, FOSS, Open Source, Public Health

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HRIS Potential in Tanzania’s Health Workforce Planning Improvement

As a public healthcare management professional and a former intern with IntraHealth, I have had the opportunity to work with human resources information systems (HRIS). I believe an HRIS is a robust, simple and easy-to-manage tool that Tanzania can utilize for efficient healthcare workforce management.

Tanzania has a healthcare workforce deficit compared to its workforce influx, attrition, and population growth. At the same time, HIV prevalence is projected to further increase the workforce demand. With the deficit in the healthcare workforce and high burden of diseases, the country’s policy and decision makers need to clearly understand the current healthcare workforce situation in order to plan for optimization and strategize interventions to improve the situation.

The Capacity Project’s free and integrated Open Source human resources information system (HRIS) software is capable of capturing healthcare workforce information throughout training and employment. It can be used by healthcare authorities such as the Public Health Association, the Medical Association, the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare and healthcare service providers, to maintain current and accurate healthcare workforce information required for correct and efficient response to healthcare delivery challenges.

The loosely manual and scattered electronic information currently maintained by the healthcare authorities can be linked and integrated through an electronic HRIS with verified accuracy and regular updates, thus saving much needed resources that would otherwise be required to conventionally maintain the current system. Similarly, career-related information like relocations, promotions, training and remuneration can be smoothly tracked by the system, analyzed and used for planning and reporting.

An increase in training infrastructure is seen as an option toward bridging the country workforce gap. The HRIS will be useful in determining exact requirement and devising of plan to address the same. Given that training is a long-term solution, based on reliable data, short-term training programs could be devised to improve the situation. HRIS-guided decisions would extend government’s health care policy reforms including private sector participation in health education provision.

Lack of linked information has resulted in significant differences in the number of health workers per capita in different areas of the country with urban areas having better staffing ratios than rural ones. This has resulted into staff ratios determination by existing infrastructure rather than actual needs thus limiting interventions through usual human resource policy means. The data-based HRIS will be a useful tool for balanced workforce deployment to meet health care needs.

- - Bakari Bakari

Bakari A. Bakari (MBA), has served as the Information Systems Manager with the Medical Stores Department, Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, since 1999. He is currently a Hubert Humphrey Fellow 2007/08, at the School of Public Health, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He spent six weeks as an intern with IntraHealth International Inc., Chapel Hill working with HRIS, Open Source Technologies and PDA usage in data collection.

Posted by Carol Bales on 4/9/2008 • Tags: Africa, HRIS, iHRIS

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Law School

This morning Kate Somers (IntraHealth Senior Program Development Team Leader) and I went to a class at the UNC School of Law. The class is a contracts law class which is taught by a close friend. What Kate talked about was a recent contract she wrote for a project which we will be announcing shortly. I was there because the project in question will deal very directly with open source technologies and the professor thought it important to explain the work as well as the contract.

The class went very well as it dealt fairly evenly with both our planned initiative, and the details of the contract. I think the point of having us there was both to capture the attention of those students who are very interested in contract law and to show those who might not have as big an interest in the required class how powerful a tool a good contract can be.  I would imagine that in the course of their regular classwork these students don’t come across contracts that are quite like the ones Kate has to draw up dealing with an organization like IntraHealth, and the work we do with open source technologies.

For me it was great to note the interest the students had in the work we are doing here at IntraHealth, and more specifically in the Informatics group. Of course, any student is eager to take the opportunity to discuss things outside of those which are assigned, still there were some great questions about our work and the project in question.

I have not been in a college classroom since my own days in college which are too far back now for me to want to mention. Nonetheless, when I was in college there were no such things as laptops. Now, the group of folks staring at the front of the classroom are doing so just over the tops of their laptop screens. In trying to explain why an organization like IntraHealth is working within open source licensing I pointed out that throughout that classroom I could see many Apple computers, some Dells, and a few HP’s. I assumed that most of the non-Apple computers were running Windows. I’m not entirely sure how many people are in that class but perhaps it was around 40 people. If we were to very conservatively assume that the license fee for each machine (just for the operating system) was $200 that would be $8000 worth of operating systems in that room alone. When we go into relatively poor countries, and into relatively poor Ministries of Health and attempt to put in systems with expensive per-seat license fees it typically cannot work. Add to that the fact that specialized systems usually have license fees that dwarf those of operating systems and you can see the problem. All this before we even get to upgrade-fees and the cost of customizing a system to suit the users specific needs.

Of course there are many more benefits to us using open source technologies but in many ways it all comes back to this economic question. For most of us, I think it is safe to say that to help health care workers do their work more efficiently so that they can help more people, we really aren’t concerned whether the tools are open source or proprietary - as long as we are helping them. However, there is an organic path with the finances and with the ownership model that very directly leads us to use and promote open source for this work. When we consider long-term sustainability on top of that, to me, we again come back to open source due to its usual adherence to standards as well as the complete and open access and ownership of the code.

Posted by David Mason on 3/25/2008 • Tags: Open Source, Resources, Sustainability

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iHRIS Qualify and Manage Versions 3.0: The Long Road to Releasing Software

As I have promised, we are releasing versions 3.0 of iHRIS Manage and iHRIS Qualify this month. We will start by posting new live demos on the HRIS Strengthening website and stable release versions of the code on our Launchpad hosting site. We’ll follow that up with complete packages that you can download from the HRIS Strengthening website, which will make it easier to install and try out the software.

Writing information systems is hard and sometimes frustrating work. As soon as a new version comes out, our users are clamoring for new features. We feel like we’ll never catch up with the demand. This can be discouraging, until we realize that the systems must be serving a purpose if the users keep wanting more. One thing we have to balance is the need to create software that is general and useful enough for any potential user but can be readily customized for specific settings.

As all software users know, software rarely fits your specific needs out of the box. We knew that there would be different requirements particularly for HR information systems from country to country and even among different facilities. We have striven to make our software easily customizable by the end users, and Version 3.0 builds on this by introducing configurable modules. System administrators can turn off modules they don’t need or set custom settings for modules without requiring programming experience. Programmers can write their own modules and easily integrate them into the system. We plan to follow up these improvements with a customized report-building tool and customizable roles; both should be available by summer.

Another big improvement in Version 3.0 is the ability to export data from reports in a variety of formats, including an attractive printable PDF. This will make data much more useful as it can easily be brought into Excel for more intensive analysis or imported into other systems.

We are looking forward to making versions 3.0 of iHRIS Manage and iHRIS Qualify available for you. But even more, we are looking forward to seeing what users will do with the software. We already have local developers in Uganda and Kenya customizing both systems for their own needs. As more developers contribute customizations and modules, our information systems can only improve for everyone. We welcome all contributions. There’s a lot that still needs to be done.

If you are interested in contributing to this Open Source development project, please contact us.

Posted by Shannon Turlington on 3/7/2008 • Tags: Development, HRIS, Information Systems, Open Source, Releases, Software, iHRIS

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