While Ministries of Health across Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America have made major advances in establishing cross-cutting foundational information systems such as Health Management Information Systems (HMIS), Logistics Management Information Systems (LMIS) and Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response systems (IDSR), complex environmental and vector-borne diseases such as malaria and several neglected tropical diseases require a significant amount of additional data to enable the effective execution of programmatic activities and data-driven strategic planning and programmatic evaluations in order to ultimately reduce the burden of these diseases on communities and improve population-wide health outcomes.
This includes data on interventions that form the primary preventative measure (such as bed net distribution or mass drug administration campaigns), vector surveillance, surveys, quality of care, and more which commonly still rely on paper and Excel-based tools, increasingly creating demand for disease-specific information systems that address these comprehensive data management needs. As implementing partners and NGOs introduce highly vertical standalone tools and systems to fill these gaps, the digital health landscape in each country runs the risk of growing increasingly fragmented.
Ministries of Health must increase collaboration between Departments of Information Systems and individual disease programs to design, develop and implement disease-focused information systems that complement and integrate with broader systems like the HMIS and LMIS, and that can be plugged into the wider government-owned digital health architecture, ecosystem, and vision. In this session, participants heard from three distinct Ministry of Health representatives from Ethiopia, Mozambique and Panama that have made significant strides in developing and rolling out integrated malaria and integrated NTD information systems through government-driven inter-departmental collaboration towards a common vision. Participants heard diverse perspectives from a malaria program, an NTD program, and an informatics department.
