Planning

The Health Workforce Information Ecosystem

Health workforce information systems have been proliferating in countries to address different health workforce needs, including management systems in the public and private sector, regulatory information systems including professional council registration and licensure, and training information systems. However, these different systems are not reaching their full potential due to failure to work as an interoperable whole. Presented at the GETHealth Summit in Dublin, Ireland (November 13–14, 2014), this poster describes work to develop a new data exchange standard, Care Services Discovery. This technology is open and collaborative, available for support by a wide variety of technologies, including iHRIS, DHIS 2, and UNICEF’s RapidPro platform. Open source technologies and open standards approaches make a formidable combination to address information needs.

CapacityPlus Technical Brief #13 (PDF)

Human resources information systems are successful when they support policy and management decisions and when those decisions lead to better health care. However, success depends on the quality of the human resources for health data going into the system. The aim of this technical brief is to convey why data standards matter. The authors review organizational, national, and international data standards that can help ensure data quality, provide country examples, and discuss the key role of multisectoral stakeholder leadership groups in formulating and reaching consensus on standards.

This article provides a comprehensive overview of the first-ever national application of the Workload Indicators of Staffing Need (WISN) tool developed by the World Health Organization. The article describes the steps involved in implementing WISN, a human resources management tool, in Namibia, discusses software and data challenges, summarizes key findings relating to health worker shortages and inequities, and reviews the utility of the WISN findings for policy-makers in Namibia. The authors observe that the WISN method can offer credible workload-based evidence to improve the equity and distribution of health workers within a region or across similar types of facilities nationwide. Perhaps most importantly, the WISN tool allows policy-makers to consider the potential impact of decisions on staff requirements before actually making the decisions.

iHRIS Manage Overview

An overview of iHRIS Manage, the HR management component of the iHRIS Suite. Using iHRIS Manage, decision-makers at the Ministry of Health, a district health office, or a health care facility can collect, manage, and analyze detailed information about employed health workers and applicants.