Bangladesh's Electronic Management Information Systems: Using Digital Technology to Link Community Data with Facility Data: Case Study

Author(s): Dawne Walker, Tariq Azim

Year: 2018

Abstract:

Strengthening community health information systems (CHIS) entails improving the case management data collection tools used by community health workers and the performance monitoring tools used by their supervisors. By strengthening these tools, the quality of information flowing into the CHIS will improve and be more likely to be used for decision making by wider stakeholder groups. This case study sought to answer the following question:

Is there a use case where a country has strengthened its CHIS and linked it to a facility information system using mHealth solutions?

To answer this question, MEASURE Evaluation used the mHealth for monitoring and evaluation (M&E) and case management landscape analysis developed for Scaling Mobile Community-Based Health Information Systems to select an example for the case study. We looked for examples in which the national government was involved in developing mobile case management tools and integrating the mobile tools with the larger electronic health management information system (MIS).

In Bangladesh, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MOHFW) and its partners—the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the USAID-funded MEASURE Evaluation, the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b), the MaMoni Health Systems Strengthening (HSS) Project, and the Systems for Improved Access to Pharmaceuticals and Services (SIAPS) Project—have implemented an electronic MIS (eMIS) in two districts and are scaling it up nationally. This eMIS created an integrated electronic data system in which data collected at the community level are shared across primary healthcare providers and flow up to the national level. This case study looks at how Bangladesh established the eMIS and the initial changes in data management as well as service delivery that have resulted from implementing the system.