Presented by Romain Tohouri at an April 2016 USAID meeting.

1. Building Resilient Health
Information Systems in
Ebola-Affected Countries:
Experience in Liberia, Guinea, and
Sierra Leone
Romain Tohouri, MD, MSc
MEASURE Evaluation
Semi-Annual Meeting of Ebola
Recovery Implementing Partners
Washington, DC
April 8, 2016

2. MEASURE Evaluation
Ebola Portfolio
Common themes
• DHIS 2: From design and
implementation (Guinea) to working
with sophisticated systems (Liberia, Côte
d’Ivoire)
• Advisors embedded in Ministries
of Health, with follow-up
technical assistance:
− To support the development of
costed national strategic plans, costed
health information system (HIS) plans,
and partner mapping
− To help establish technical working
groups and provide MOH leadership
and technical units with mentoring and
support
• Key deliverables:
HIS strategic plans, costed HIS
operational plan, and institutional
capacity-building plans
Countries

3. Embedded TA
Objectives and Deliverables
Objectives Major Achievements
• To develop and initiate
implementation of the
new HIS strategy,
including a costed
operational plan for
country-led HIS
development and
institutional capacity
strengthening
• To accelerate the process
of integrating the various
HIS systems and their
sub-systems (e.g., iDSR,
LMIS, iHRIS)
• To enhance MOH
capacity to use data for
decision making
• Comprehensive HIS assessment report
(Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea)
• IT assessment report (Liberia, Guinea)
• Institutional capacity-building action plan
(Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea)
• Revamped HIS technical working groups
(Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea)
• 2016−2021 HIS strategy (Liberia, Sierra
Leone, Guinea)
• 2015−2017 costed operational plan
(Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea)
• National HIS architecture and specific
integration solutions (Liberia)
• Master facility list (Guinea, Sierra Leone)
• DHIS 2 implementation/support (Guinea,
Sierra Leone, Liberia)

4. Embedded TA
Challenges and Recommendations
Main challenges Recommendations
• Availability of power supply
• Poor IT infrastructure to
support HIS
• Interoperability between
IDSR and HMIS
• Poor availability of policy
documents to guide HIS
activities
• Inadequate human resources
to support HIS at MOH level
• Leadership at MOH level
• Conflict of leadership among
IPs/HIS stakeholders in
Ebola-affected countries
• Inadequate investment in HIS
• Conduct HIS IT assessment (in Sierra
Leone) and HIS enterprise architecture
analysis to complement HIS strategic
plan (in Sierra Leone and Guinea)
• Make HIS sub-systems interoperable
• Build and strengthen the pool of IT/HIS
capacity at MOH level
• Strengthen stakeholder coordination
(through support to HIS TWG led by
MOH)
• Leverage successful HIS strengthening
lessons from other countries in the
region
• Recognize that HIS strengthening is
long-term investment requiring high-
level technical expertise

5. MEASURE Evaluation is funded by the U.S. Agency
for International Development (USAID) under terms
of Cooperative Agreement AID-OAA-L-14-00004 and
implemented by the Carolina Population Center, University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partnership with ICF
International, John Snow, Inc., Management Sciences for
Health, Palladium, and Tulane University. The views
expressed in this presentation do not necessarily reflect
the views of USAID or the United States government.
http://www.cpc.unc.edu/measure/news/asking-the-right-questions-post-ebola
http://www.cpc.unc.edu/measure/our-work/health-information-systems
www.measureevaluation.org