HMIS Role In The Health System

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HMIS is a set of interrelated components that work together to collect, retrieve, process, store disseminate, and use health information and knowledge to support such healthcare system activities as planning, control, and coordination (Lippeveld, 2000). A comprehensive health system offers integrated health services including curative care, rehabilitative care, disease prevention, and health promotion services. Being a functional entity within the framework of such a system, the goal of HMIS is to generate pertinent and quality information for these endeavors so that health system stakeholders use the information to make evidence-based, transparent, and rational decisions, and then interventions. The components of HMIS involve from data on events, routines, staff and other resources to everything that supports and affects decision-making including data collection and compilation formats and registers, stationery, information technologies, infrastructures, procedures, review meetings, and policies. In short, it includes anything that involves the what, where, when, who, why, and how of collecting, processing, analyzing, presenting, interpreting and using health related information. In addition to its significance to health management and service delivery, the integrated effort around HMIS also extends its benefits to program action, research, and also to influencing policy-making (AbouZahr C, Adjei S, et al. (2007). As an integral component of the health system, HMIS plays important supporting roles (Lippeveld and Sauerborn, 2000). The ultimate goal of a health system being improving the health status of individuals in a population, the major roles of HMIS can be discussed with respect to coverage, quality of health services ... ... middle of paper ... ...This model is a diagrammatic way of looking at the number of data items that need to be gathered at each level of the health system. A critical question to this end is to determine what information is needed at what level. Traditionally, information demands emanate from international agencies such as the WHO or from donor agencies that supply funds. Also, to ensure that the same basic information is available from all facilities, a national committee determines the essential data sets (EDS), “a set of those minimum data elements that are needed for the calculation of priority indicators” (Braa et al., 2004, p. 350) that should be collected by everyone delivering health services. Despite the demands for many requests of information, a selected number of essential data items by which to calculate sensitive indicators to monitor progress should be precisely identified.

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