Appendix B: Making It Easier to Share Data

At a training in Senegal Regional approaches not only facilitate sharing among countries, they can support better sharing among global projects and multilateral organizations. WAHO coordinated a regional training on national health information systems given jointly by CapacityPlus’s iHRIS team and two “sister” open source software projects, DHIS 2 and OpenMRS.

DHIS 2 is the recognized global standard for open source disease surveillance and service statistics; OpenMRS is the most widely-adopted open source medical records system in developing countries.

Having a unique opportunity to collaborate in person, the three teams demonstrated for the first time the use of the SDMX-HD interoperability standard (supported by the World Health Organization) to share data among the systems.

This is an important step for countries to compare data such as service delivery demand (from DHIS 2) with health worker skills supply (from iHRIS). Sierra Leone offered its data as the pilot country; with its success to build on, the approach has now been implemented by joint software teams in Tanzania (Zanzibar) and Kenya, and is being extended to Botswana and Uganda.