Technical Report on Electronic Health Management Information System (eHMIS)

This electronic application is a robust system, time-tested for over 2 years, and serves the SNNPR Regional Health Bureau (RHB) with satisfaction. The RHB is now able to generate various reports within seconds. The eHMIS is a home-grown solution developed by Ethiopian IT experts, taking advantage of international expertise made available by John Snow Inc. (JSI). The development of the application took account of the Ethiopian health system's context and requirements, yet having the standard design and operational features seen in any internationally acclaimed IT application. eHMIS has been developed to suit particularly the Ethiopian Health Management Information System (HMIS) with the ability to meet any future changes or information needs as they evolve. The eHMIS has the ability to be installed and implemented in any Region of Ethiopia and has the capacity to interoperate with any other system used by the Federal Ministry of Health (FMOH). The important features of the eHMIS in SNNPR include the Health System Reference Database (HSRD), which provides population denominators for various catchment areas, health facility information, and human resource information. Data for the whole SNNPR has been entered into the system and is readily available for updating and use. The eHMIS also features a data entry module, which can be done in two ways: manual data entry and scanning, which uses intelligent character recognition to populate the HMIS database. The scanning of facility reporting forms is especially set to reduce the time the RHB spends manually entering data by a significant margin. This solution is expected to shift the current clerical task to more advanced roles such as analyzing data for decision-making and working on improving data quality. The offline manual data entry at woreda health offices is currently being rolled out to all the woreda health offices in SNNPR. This feature is empowering the woreda health offices to enter their own data as soon as HMIS reports are received from the health facilities, so that the monthly HMIS data is promptly available and accessible to district and zonal managers for review. The entered monthly report data is uploaded into the Regional server through the internet. The eHMIS also features data synchronization, which allows synchronization of HMIS data either entered at the woreda level or at the regional health bureau level. The Date Aggregation Module is an application that dynamically aggregates data entered via the Data Entry Module to provide woreda, zonal, and regional aggregation for the month, quarter, and year. Thus, both aggregated data and data disaggregated up to Health Post level are readily available to the managers and decision-makers. The aggregation software is adding significant time savings and improvement to quality by reducing the time it takes to aggregate reports to a matter of seconds and virtually eliminating calculation errors that might occur if the task was to be done manually. The eHMIS also features the HMIS Report Status Tracker, which allows tracking the receipt and processing of HMIS monthly reports. It also lists the names of missing health facilities to enable the HMIS focal person to follow up with those facilities to submit their reports. The Performance Reporting feature provides a quick snapshot of woreda, zonal, and regional level performance with regard to HMIS indicators and comparisons with targets set by the region. The Decision Support System (DSS) is the dashboard that provides a comprehensive view of the HMIS data, allowing users to analyze and make informed decisions. The DSS is designed to provide users with the necessary information to make data-driven decisions, and it is an essential component of the eHMIS.