[Gerard Bisama]

For my point of view, the interoperability problem start by the lack of eHealth Strategy in a lot of Country. Because this document constitutes a guideline to build a framework for the Health Information System as component of the Health System. Many stakeholder start thinking of Interoperability after the implementation of some eHealth applications at the national level. Some countries don’t have even eHealth Strategies or Roadmap document that express their need in term of eHealth tools implementation. Interoperability is not a common concept in the vocabulary of stakeholder unless the need of sharing data is raised on the ground and at that time most country realize that some eHealth tools may share data and some not. But in my point of view, the starting point is to have a Master Facility List, an Interlinked Health Worker Registry and to provide a unique identifier to the population that will allow to build a longitudinal Electronic Health Record System to track patient across the country.

[Gerard Bisama]

Hi everyone sorry for coming late to this discussion, the main difference between iHRIS and HR and payroll system used by government is that iHRIS is used for managing specific HR information of health worker like cadre, specialization, in-service training that could help the MoH to build effective policy and planning to enhance Health. Problem related to the ratio of health worker by category in a population, the retention of health worker in rural area, the promotion of certain medical curriculum (Medical specialization), gender discrimination in certain Medical professional categories and training need assessment, track of other health worker in private and faith-based facilities could only be solved with a proper HRIS for Health . Meanwhile, the HR and Payroll system are used to know the number of health worker, their salary grade and the number of year that will help them to calculate the salary and track payment. However some payroll systems contain advanced analytical tools for salary and finance that iHRIS do not have. In this case we can share information between these two systems remains the key features to build an integrated Heatlh IT architecture. But one major problem is that in Most African Countries the payroll system are not open source software that make then difficult to configure for sharing information with others systems. With payroll proprietary software with no interface to share information, what can be done in my point of view is to have access to the database and develop tools to export information in CSV or XML and share them with iHRIS.

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