Strengthening community health programs is key in delivering high quality and equitable health services, particularly to vulnerable and hard to reach communities. Since 2001, Uganda Ministry of Health (MoH) has implemented a community based approach to primary health care through the use of Village Health Teams (VHTs) to deliver health care services to households. A survey done by Uganda MOH in 2021 showed that most VHTs spent a lot of time compiling paper reports, reports submitted by VHTs were not accurate and a lot of siloed disease specific community health digital tools existed. To help address these challenges and findings, the Uganda MoH decided to coordinate and take a lead in the design and development of a national Electronic Community Health Information System (eCHIS). This would help to ensure that there is an appropriate framework for implementation of a government owned eCHIS, the system would support many functionalities and program areas and also be interoperable with other health information systems.
Two open source technologies were selected to power the Uganda electronic community health information system, these are Community Health Toolkit (CHT) and OpenSRP. The data collected by the two apps will be integrated into a single data management and visualisation platform. Uganda MOH has collaborated with stakeholders and partners to design and develop the eCHIS VHT app, which is powered by CHT. The CHT based eCHIS app supports VHT’s, VHT Coordinators and facility based Health Assistants to deliver antenatal, postnatal, nutrition, immunization, ICCM, malaria, HIV and TB health care services, the app also supports stock monitoring workflows. The CHT eCHIS app has been integrated with DHIS2, translated to the local language (Luganda) and a data quality tool has been incorporated into the app to automate the execution of data quality checks.
Working side by side with stakeholders and implementing partners. MOH Uganda has coordinated the deployment of the tool to 9 districts in Uganda with about 2,111 trained on CHT based eCHIS tool. Most implementing partners who are currently using other community health digital tools have shown a lot of interest to transition to using the government recommended eCHIS, Living Goods has already transitioned 209 users who are based in Oyam district from using Smart Health App to Uganda official CHT eCHIS app.
Thank you Solomon Muhumuza (muhumuzasol@gmail.com) for the great presentation and sharing the MOH Uganda journey of implementing eCHIS. Here is the recording of the Uganda eCHIS community story presentation.