Goals
The main goal of the Developers and Supporters Workgroup is to bring forth mutual knowledge exchange and cooperation between Tanzanian and Finnish actors in selected areas of digital healthcare. This happens by different means: discussions, workshops, fieldwork, studies, supervision of studies, quality reviews, etc. In all these methods and approaches working together and mutual participation is emphasized.
Participants
Dr. Auvo Finne has been the workgroup coordinator. In addition to other members of the Finnish eHealth project staff, the partner and target organizations have been actively contributing and participating in the workgroup’s activities. These organizations include: CSSC, APHFTA, UDSM, NM-AIST, MoHSW, Po-RALG and individual hospitals.
Auvo Finne going to a meeting with APHFTA (The Association of Private Health Facilities in Tanzania)
Tasks, Results and Plans
The first major task of the workgroup was the comparison of the main hospital information systems in Tanzania: GoTHoMIS, Care2X and AfyaPro. The comparison was made from technical and user perspectives. Eight different hospitals were studied.
The results are published in three different documents:
- Report on the technical aspects (Finne, May 2018)
- On Adoption and Use of Hospital Information systems in Developing Countries (Peltola, December 2019)
- User Experience of Hospital Systems in Tanzania (Laitinen, Kerenge and Koivu, January 2020)
Besides the workgroup activity Dr. Finne co-supervised the doctor’s thesis “A Secure and Interoperable Blockchain-Based Information Sharing system for Healthcare Providers in Developing Countries” (Kombe, March 2020). The publication has been well received for example in the Research Gate community.
The master’s thesis “Selecting a hospital information system in a developing country: Assessment criteria and systems analysis” (Pelic, March 2020) is also closely related to the scope of the workgroup.
During the pandemic all the activities must have been carried out remotely. At the end of 2020 APHFTA made a proposal to create a management information system (AMIS) in order to collect, analyse, store and retrieve information about its member facilities. The proposal was accepted and work funded by the eHealth project. Dr. Finne provided support and quality assessment to APHFTA throughout the system development. Data collection report and prototype documentation was published in January 2021. This was followed by the system and training documentation in March 2021.
Meeting with APHFTA in Dar es Salaam
Another remote activity is the designing of an interoperability layer architecture for data exchange between hospital information systems and the national Health Management Information System (DHIS2). The work is done by the UDSM. Dr. Finne has been providing technical input for his part.
A workshop series on hospital business intelligence has been organized between June-November 2021. The aim of the series has been to gather hospital business experts, IT experts and researchers to work together in order to create a prototype analytics platform for health facilities.
