RHIS - Making the case for investing in Routine Health Information Systems (RHIS) to achieve the health-related SDGs
Project Abstract
Routine Health Information Systems (RHIS) are the basis for decision-making in health service delivery, from frontline health workers up to national authorities and the international community. Hence, they are an intricate part of quality of health care. RHIS are used universally in each and every health care event at all levels of the health system. Yet, they are relatively neglected by funders and in research.
Despite the availability of technological developments, severe problems jeopardise the capacity of RHIS to inform decision-making and has been so for decades; namely: overload of health workers having to divert patient care to respond to demands for data collection and management, fragmentation of data among public health programmes, limited interconnectivity between technological subsystems and externally driven changes to the systems, to mention a few.
Cognisant of these challenges, the World Health Organisation (WHO), in alignment with the Health Data Collaborative (DHC), has requested to carry out a ‘Return of RHIS Investment’ study. The Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH) and the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC) have joined efforts to design and complete this study.
Should we invest in RHIS? Yes, more but also better. We advocate for a paradigm shift to rethink how RHIS are conceived and implemented. We suggest to invest in: RHIS that are truly linked to decision-making and to strategies to improve quality of care and UHC; bringing new approaches to inform RHIS ideations, such as human-centred design, instead of the imperative to fill in digital or paper based spreadsheets; putting health services users and health workers at the centre of health care and stopping blaming health workers for ill-defined systems; and carrying out robust, experimental research and de-implement what harms in RHIS.
See the final deliverables in the Health Data Collaborative website!
