The Government of Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Health and Child Care www.zim.gov.zw assisted by RTI International www.rti.org and supported by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention www.cdc.gov (CDC) under the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, has launched a new Zimbabwe national health information system with mobile health messaging.
The new system based on the District Health Information System version 2 (DHIS-2) supports the collection and analysis of routine health services data and non-routine data such as population estimates. So far, the Ministry of Health and Child Care has integrated outpatient and inpatient data along with health facility statistics, HIV, tuberculosis, psychiatric, and village health worker datasets.
“The new system will ensure the availability of real-time data and information for decision- making, to allow the ministry to detect and respond to outbreaks or other health events early”, explains Dr. Ponesai Nyika, Deputy Director of Health Information Systems in the Ministry of Health and Child Care. He adds, “The design and flexibility of the system will allow the ministry to incorporate other program databases into the national data repository.”
The RTI-led Zimbabwe Health Information and Support Project enabled the local customization, training, and implementation of DHIS 1.4 in 2011 and 2012. Next, the project piloted and successfully rolled out version 2 to all district health offices, city health departments, provincial health offices, and the Ministry of Health and Child Care national office in 2013.
RTI also supported the customization of FrontlineSMS www.frontlinesms.com and the training of health workers on the FrontlineSMS mobile phone-based Weekly Disease Surveillance system. In addition, RTI has trained health workers on the Early Infant Diagnosis system built on the same FrontlineSMS platform, incorporating a two-way mobile health messaging system. Both systems have been implemented in more than 75 percent of healthcare facilities in Zimbabwe.
By using mobile phone-based systems, health facilities can easily transmit data through text messaging to a central server that automatically forwards data to DHIS 2. This process allows health officials to access current disease surveillance data for detecting potential disease outbreaks and evaluate public health policies.
Mobile phone-based reporting has increased the timeliness of reporting for participating health facilities by more than 90 percent for most of 2012 and 2013, as compared to less than 50 percent prior to the deployment of the new system.
The system is also used to relay HIV early infant diagnosis information between health facilities and Zimbabwe’s National Microbiology Reference Laboratory. Using the mobile phone-based system, nurses are able to notify the laboratory of early infant diagnosis samples collected in the field and then receive results via their mobile devices. A notification message is also sent to the infant’s caregiver to let the caregiver know when they should be able to collect results from the health facility.