This week I start working on a project to help gather medical information in villages throughout Rwanda, so the project I’ve been working on for the past couple of months is officially over. I’ve written my postmortem and had a chance to recuperate from the travel (including the airline losing my baggage in London and a screaming three year old on an eight hour flight — horror stories best only hinted at).
But this last project looks as if it was about as successful as I could hope for, so indulge me a few moments while I tell you what we did.
While medical information is gathered throughout Uganda, reports are regularly written, and analysis is frequently done, sharing information between health care workers and officials is problematic. Until now, there was only one small central library at the Ministry of Health which held only a single stand-alone PC for accessing and reading electronic documents.
To make matters worse, the proprietary software for storing and accessing the electronic documents only accepted PDFs, so anything a doctor wrote in, say, Microsoft Word had to be converted before it could be used in the system.
With the help of the Knowledge Management (KM) team at IntraHealth, a few of us on the Informatics team put together a Joomla+KnowledgeTree combination that would allow health care workers and officials to upload any Office document, collaborate around them, and easily access them from any networked computer.
My work centered on the integration and initial set up of the software — putting it all together in a way that made the KM people happy. And, frankly, much of that work isn’t any different than what I could be doing in almost any Tech Shop or corporate environment. And for a while, it was like any software project, full of frustrations and delays. While KnowledgeTree was an obviously mature piece of software, I found some of its idiosyncrasies irritating and some of its capabilities anemic.
The real difference — the real satisfaction — came when I was finally able to sit down with the librarian at the Ministry of Health in Uganda and I heard him say “This is great, it is so much better and easier to than our current system! And we don’t have convert all our files to PDF first!”
It was a relief to hear those words. Until then, doubt still lingered. But after that meeting, while there was still a lot of work to be done and a lot of work that I wouldn’t be able to complete, now I knew that we had a successful, even worthwhile, product.
Even better, the technical people I worked with and trained as well as the Ministry workers all understood the usefulness and had the same goal in mind: fostering adoption of the new “electronic library” throughout Uganda.
Now, back to the work. Hopefully I’ll have another success story in a few months.
Posted by
Mark Hershberger on 8/14/2008 • Tags: Africa, Capacity Building, FOSS, Information Systems, Tools
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The DDDM workshop in Uganda this summer provided the first opportunity for many of the participants to review and discuss reports from the iHRIS Qualify system in the Nurses and Midwives Council. Dr. Pamela McQuide, HRIS leader, said she was extremely excited about participants’ reactions to seeing the reports. “When participants had actual Ugandan data, they erupted in discussion,” she said. She explained that the reports spurred lots of questions and they talked for three or more hours, showing that “they are very hungry for their own data and supporting it.”
One participant said the workshop gave meaning to the data they had been generating and built up credibility and interest in the HR information systems being established in Uganda. “It was the first attempt we had at integrating information from the various sub-systems in HRH and seeing how all these sort of fit together in order to have meaningful information.” He went on to say that the most surprising thing he realized was the amount of data already available. “It was just amazing to know there was so much data already available from different subsystems. I found that overwhelming, it was just phenomenal.” As he stated, a strong HRIS is a phenomenal tool for integrating data, where the sum becomes much more important than the parts.
Another participant said that after viewing the data he realized they already had routine information that they should start taking advantage of. He described how different the situation in Uganda was before HRIS strengthening was initiated, “We were looking at a format that was inaccessible, it was paper-based and in containers, but now that it’s in a database it’s easy to analyze.” He went on to say that the reports presented at the workshop were “able to tell us what was really happening on the ground.”
The HRIS team is in the process of implementing similar systems at the other three Uganda medical licensing bodies (the Pharmacy Council, Medical and Dental Council, and Allied Health Professional Councils). As an outcome of the workshop this summer, bi-annual HR data reports will be produced. The reports will incorporate data from all four councils and other sources, such as data from the EU and will influence annual reporting, budgeting, and strategic planning.
Once data can be integrated from various sources and reports can be generated, it is important that the information is presented in a variety of ways so that decision makers can understand and use it. Dykki Settle, HRIS leader, led a session on data quality and presentation that covered useful techniques to enable decision makers to use data. He emphasized that reports should be timely, tied to policy questions and available to the right people. Colorful reports will not be effective unless, as Ummuro Adano has stated, they are “combined with active leadership, change management, and effective professional development for key decision makers.”
Posted by
Carol Bales on 11/30/2007 • Tags: Africa, Capacity Building, Decision-Making, FOSS, FOSS4G, HRIS, ICT4d, Information Systems, Open Source, Public Health, Sustainability
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Luke, HR Information Systems (HRIS) senior developer, and myself, Geographic Information System (GIS) manager, visited the “Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial” (FOSS4G) conference in Victoria, Canada this last week. We wanted to get a better handle on how HRIS and GIS could interact within an open-source context. We walked away with some major conclusions and ideas on how to further develop GIS capabilities within and beyond HRIS. But as HRIS is built on the premise of open-source, this conference also gave us an opportunity to participate and learn from an organized community of geospatial software users which has been making progress in furthering the open-source ideal.
What we saw was a young and passionate movement not-so-subtly showcasing their dedication for open-source as a tool by which to challenge corporate, or closed-source, IT monopolies in the geospatial domain. Just like the domination of (preinstalled) corporate Windows operating system over the free and viable Linux alternative—for no reason other then “familiarity”—so is the purchase of ESRI products, the leading closed-source geospatial analysis software system, taken for granted in the geospatial realm. Sold for a hefty price and with annual update/support contracts, ESRI dominates, over the free, open-source GIS software available. Why is this? Is open-source GIS less viable then its big, corporate version?
FOSS4G challenged corporate geospatial IT by providing a different vision. As Damian Conway, PERL- enthusiast and keynote speaker emphasized: “Open Source software development and support is based on a model of collaborative interaction that is entirely different form the competitive world of commercial software. It’s not a business, it’s a culture”. A culture? In the geospatial world, this culture of open-source expresses itself, according to Paul Ramsey, Director of Refractions Research, through four largely independent development “tribes”: “within each tribe, developers cross-pollinate very heavily, contribute to multiple projects, and have high awareness of ongoing developments.”
The tribes are identified by some of their totem pole (apt Canadian analogy for the symbol that focuses their unity) software solutions. First there is the “C” tribe, including geospatial software such as MapServer, GRASS, PostGIS, QGIS. Then there is the Java tribe, building geospatial solutions from a java platform with products like GeoTools, uDig, Geoserver. Then there is .Net tribe, consisting of developers working on Worldwind, SharpMap and other software. Finally, a loose category of developers are part of the Web tribe, including various toolkits and webservices providing browser based spatial services. So when there are tribes, where is the tribal warfare (don’t tribes always do that?)? And, to extent the analogy, how does the neocolonial corporate ESRI system relate to them? Capitalist oppression and exploitation of the hobbying, tribal geeks?
One would assume that the existence of four developer community tribes in the geospatial open-source world would automatically assume a hefty competition for resources, if not all-out tribal warfare. This in fact does not seem to be the case at all. I tried myself to ask one of the tribal member to compare his Java based webmapping server with the C++ version. He smiled at me and pretty much explained that there is little difference, and what more, that in fact they would operate with pretty much any other software solution outside of their tribal clans. Reason? The interoperability principle. That, and perhaps the fact that all tribal members are united through the ambition of statehood.
What makes open-source so different from a corporate system like ESRI is its fundamental interest in building software according to universal standards. This in contrast to the strategic interest of any closed, corporate system to somehow make users reliant on their system alone. Interoperability refers to the achievement of exchange of communication and data through common standards across software platforms and databases. In the geospatial world, the Open Geospatial Consortium has been working hard to achieve these standards, and the fruits of this labor is the lack of any ethnic warfare between the open-source tribes roaming around in geoland.
Interoperability is also about synthesis, or the emergence of a larger whole out of components by allowing for free flow of information, interactivity. In the words of David Schell, CEO and Chairman of the Open Geospatial Consortium: “Interoperabiltiy seems to be about the integration of information. What it is really about is the coordination of organizational behavior.” Or, in other words, interoperability is created by organizations working together to more efficiently achieve goals.
The lessons for HRIS, Capacity building, and international development at large might be obvious: open architecture is important if not crucial because it provides free access to a diversity of information, motivates integration the coordination of organizational behavior. It is possible to develop lasting technology solutions in real-time, facilitating a common picture of reality for different organizations that all have different views of the situation collectively. Open-source is about creating community through diversity. It is the essence of democratic behavior itself. Because there is no ownership, open-source maximizes the willingness of partners to share data, ideas, and innovations, and it allows software to move beyond building stove pipes, or vendor specific solutions, and address requirements built to a standard.
Posted by
Danny de Vries on 10/17/2007 • Tags: Capacity Building, FOSS, FOSS4G, GIS, HRIS, Information Systems, Open Source, Sustainability, Technology
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