Country Health Information Systems and Data Use (CHISU) Results in Action: Creating an online “Legisanté” library to increase accessibility of Burkina Faso’s strategic public health documents

In 2015, the MHPH created the Department of Archives and Documentation (DAD) to collect, compile, safeguard, and manage the Ministry's archives. Despite being fully operational, DAD faces challenges in implementing its mission, primarily due to manual archiving of standard documents and regulatory texts, which fails to guarantee document security and does not facilitate access to these documents for MHPH staff and the public. The MHPH authorities recommended setting up an online digital library with regulated access to the various documents to address these challenges. With financial support from USAID, the Country Health Information Systems and Data Use (CHISU) program provided technical support to DAD to set up an online application called "Legisanté" to manage the regulatory texts and other strategic documents of MHPH. The process involved selecting an application, configuring it, loading digital copies of historic documents, and training DAD members on application administration and maintenance. The Legisanté application is designed locally by the Department of Information Systems of the Burkina Faso MHPH and is developed with the PHP programming language and uses a PostgreSQL database. A total of 2,201 documents were digitized and made available on the platform, making them accessible to the public or a more restricted audience depending on the nature of the document. Health facilities' accounts were created to enable their access, and continuous updates are planned as new documents become available. The online library offers several benefits, including saving users time and offering security coupled with remote access. With Legisanté, the time a user needs to retrieve a document is usually less than five minutes, without having to make a physical journey. The archives are secured and backed up digitally and remain accessible to authorized persons at all times. Legisanté also gives the Burkina Faso public free access to the country's official decrees and documents. The online library can be continuously updated to include future documents, making it a valuable resource for MHPH staff, the public, and decision-makers.