Welcome to the RHIS Forum on Health Worker Information Systems.

Dear RHINOs,
As the President of RHINO, I would like to welcome you all to this new exciting RHIS Forum on Health Worker Information Systems, and I do so in the name of the RHINO Board, as well as the RHINO Secretariat. The topic of human resource management for service delivery is key in health systems strengthening. Without a well managed health workforce, it will be be very difficult to improve the delivery of quality health services to individuals and the population. Routine health information systems can play a major role in supporting human resource management. I am very happy that IntraHealth has agreed to provide us with two expert moderators on the topic of strengthening Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) for Health.

IntraHealth has contributed worldwide in the past ten years to introduce Information and Communication Technology in the establishment of robust HRIS. In the webinar of last Tuesday moderators Amanda Bendor-Puckett and Carl Leitner have introduced the iHRIS suite for human resource management. iHRIS stands for integrated human resource information system. The concept of integration is extremely important to make sure that various human resource agencies within a country can work together on improving the management of human resources for health: the Ministry of Health and its human resources division, the civil service agency for public sector health care providers, and the Ministry of Finance for the payroll management of those workers. But also, iHRIS, developed with open software, can easily be linked it to various other RHIS subsystems such as service statistics (HMIS), logistics MIS (LMIS), disease surveillance information systems (DSIS), and financial MIS (FMIS).

I wish you all a fruitful Health Worker Information System Forum and urge you to participate actively in this Forum, which is now facilitated by user-friendly communication technology.

Theo Lippeveld, MD, MPH
President of RHINO
Chairman of the RHINO Board