Informatics collaboration (through IRD) of TB Innovations and Health Systems Strengthening (TBIHSS) Project

Challenge

The assessment of the Integrated Tuberculosis Information System on May 20, 2019 started the partnership of IRD with FHI360 in fulfilling the informatics deliverables of the USAID’s TB Innovation project. The IRD informatics team is directly collaborating with the Philippine Department of Health’s (DOH) Knowledge Management and Information Technology Service and the National TB Control Program to provide technical expertise on digital health. IRD has been essential in closing the gaps in the recording and reporting of TB data at the national scale.

Approach

IRD’s approach in implementing technologies at the country level involves close collaboration with the DOH, WHO, government agencies, and other key stakeholders. This holistic approach enables synergy and alignment of ICT initiatives that will eventually lead to increased efficiency, scalability, and sustainability of digital health efforts, as well as reduce the redundancy and wastage of resources.

Impact

The following are some of the accomplishments from this project:

• Put into writing the standard operating procedures of the ticketing system of KMITS.
• Implemented the health facility ID in the ITIS database that will serve as the base component of all other IDs.
• Deployed the ITIS Lite mobile application to improve the mandatory reporting of TB.
• Ongoing development of the mobile version of ITIS to provide offline encoding capability to different health facilities.
• Ongoing development of the data warehouse to streamline report generation and analytics.