We are pleased to announce the release of a new version of the iHRIS suite of human resources information systems. Version 3.1.2 includes several improvements and bug fixes. Here are some of the highlights:
- Our offline (Windows XP) version of iHRIS now includes for the first time all three components of the iHRIS Suite: Manage, Qualify and Plan.
- The offline version also includes all the version 3.1 enhancements, such as customized report building and the in-service training management module.
- There are many more options for customizing the installation of the offline version. For example, you can use it on the local network, choose to intall any or all of the iHRIS components as well as PHP MyAdmin for managing the database, and choose to install sample data for demonstration purposes.
- iHRIS Qualify now provides the ability to verify and log verifications of health worker records in order to improve data quality.
- iHRIS Plan now allows for copying projections to make data entry easier.
- We have added additional options to creating projections in iHRIS Plan, including a target health worker-to-population ratio and a maximum amount of change.
- Actual data entered in iHRIS Plan are now projected separately to enable easier comparison across years.
Many of these improvements were suggested by our customers who are using the software in Uganda and Namibia. We prioritize feature development for iHRIS based on the highest priority needs identified by our users.
You can download any of our software programs from the Software Download page on our website. Also check our website for live demonstrations of all the iHRIS software.
Posted by
Shannon Turlington on 10/14/2008 • Tags: Information Systems, Releases, Software, iHRIS
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Pape Gaye, president of IntraHealth International, and Dykki Settle, IntraHealth’s Director of Informatics, recently attended the PHI2008 Conference, hosted by the University of Washington in Seattle. The theme was “Envisioning Options for Integrated Public Health Information Systems for Low Resource Settings: Components, Connections, Partners, Strategies.”
The conference is led by Global Partners in Public Health Informatics, an alliance of governmental and non-governmental organizations, academic institutions, private sector contributors, and individuals that looks for ways to use communication and information technologies to address health challenges in resource-poor settings around the world. The 2008 conference included representatives of more than 50 organizations working in public health. Attendees represented 15 countries.
Pape’s presentation brought capacity building to the attention of the conference by highlighting the need to use eHealth systems to expand the reach of health workers. His talk was unique in its focus on capacity building, in that the talks of other presenters generally fit within any one of several issues including the interoperability of information systems, strategies for developing national health systems, or coordinating eHealth initiatives.
The presentation reviewed the challenges and opportunities associated with capacity building and ICT within the HRH field. He detailed the advantages of the Performance Improvement (PI) approach for its impact on health workers in low resource settings, and outlined a model of PI that can be adapted for capacity building in eHealth. Learning for Performance, IntraHealth’s HRIS work, and the HRH Global Resource Center were all highlighted during the talk.
Here are the main takeaways from his presentation:
- People working in ICT for health do not need to reinvent the wheel
- ICT development and capacity building should be done within the context of overall HRH capacity building, not outside of it
- There are exciting opportunities in eHealth for building capacity in ICT but also for how ICT can help build the capacity of health workers and better prepare them for their jobs (e.g. decision support systems)
The presentation also addressed the emergence of Generation Y, showing how eHealth initiatives represent an opportunity to expand the reach of people familiar with using technology and fluent with social networking. This part of the talk attracted particular interest from the audience in the Q and A that followed.
Posted by
Shannon Turlington on 9/30/2008 • Tags: Conferences, ICT4d, Information Systems, Public Health, Technology, eHealth
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The Capacity Project has published a new technical brief on data quality: Data Quality Considerations in Human Resource Information Systems Strengthening. The brief was written by Samwel Wakibi, our HRIS advisor for Kenya, Uganda and Southern Sudan and our expert on data quality.
Data quality issues have been central to the program experience of the Capacity Project. Experience with issues of data quality has particularly been gained within the Project’s focus on strengthening human resources information systems (HRIS) to support health workforce planning and management. This brief discusses concepts of data quality and provide examples of the importance of data management specific to the field of HRH, illustrated by the Capacity Project’s experience with HRIS strengthening in developing countries.
Read the full brief: http://www.capacityproject.org/images/stories/files/techbrief_10.pdf (PDF).
Posted by
Shannon Turlington on 8/25/2008 • Tags: Data Quality, Data management, HRIS, Information Systems, Publications, iHRIS
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The HRIS Strengthening team is pleased to announce three major software releases in our iHRIS suite of human resource information systems.
We have released Version 1.0 of our workforce planning and modeling software, iHRIS Plan. This proof-of-concept version was developed based on the results of the Workforce Planning Model Workshop held last December. It uses a simplified workforce planning model and will be piloted in Namibia next month.
In addition, we have released upgrades to our human resource management information system, iHRIS Manage, and our training, certification and licensure information system, iHRIS Qualify. Both systems now support customized reporting, which allows users to design and share reports to better analyze and aggregate data entered in the system.
This new release of iHRIS Manage also includes an in-service training management module, which enables human resources departments to schedule employees for in-service trainings, evaluate their performance, and track competencies and continuing education units earned in trainings. The in-service training management module was piloted in Tanzania in July.
Try out any of our systems by accessing the live demos on our HRIS Strengthening website.
Posted by
Shannon Turlington on 8/18/2008 • Tags: HRIS, Information Systems, Releases, Software, Workforce planning, iHRIS
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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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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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