Reply To: How to link HR info with service statistics?

[Tariq Azim]

Back to Amanda’s question on Interoperability. I don’t think the concept is very clear to everyone, especially at policy and health system management levels. On one hand policy makers and health system managers often think or are made to think that the solution to their wide range of parallel electronic systems is to through establishing interoperability. This might be true, but lot has to go into it before the systems become interoperable. So, I think it would be good to have some discussion on the basics of how interoperability works and the minimum pre-requisites of interoperability; for example, if we are talking about linking HR data and service statistics (i.e. HMIS), what are the basic requirements to make these two datasets interoperable? A quick reply could be that you create unique IDs for health staff and unique IDs for health facilities and then use those to link the data. But, to add to the complexity of this matter, CHWs mostly don’t work from a fixed facility, and the service statistics generated by them is most often lost in the aggregate data reported from the health facility. In such cases, how can you link the service statistics with the CHW data?