title: Comprehensive yet scalable health information systems for low resource settings: a collaborative effort in sierra leone.
abstract: We address the problem of how to integrate health information systems in low-income African countries in which technical infrastructure and human resources vary wildly within countries. We describe a set of tools to meet the needs of different service areas including managing aggregate indicators, patient level record systems, and mobile tools for community outreach. We present the case of Sierra Leone and use this case to motivate and illustrate an architecture that allows us to provide services at each level of the health system (national, regional, facility and community) and provide different configurations of the tools as appropriate for the individual area. Finally, we present a, collaborative implementation of this approach in Sierra Leone.
authors.affiliation: Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway.
authors.forename: Jørn
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Braa
authors.forename: Andrew S
authors.initials: AS
authors.lastname: Kanter
authors.forename: Neal
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Lesh
authors.forename: Ryan
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Crichton
authors.forename: Bob
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Jolliffe
authors.forename: Johan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Sæbø
authors.forename: Edem
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Kossi
authors.forename: Christopher J
authors.initials: CJ
authors.lastname: Seebregts
mesh_terms: D000349:Africa; D003906:Developing Countries; D063005:Health Information Systems; D006295:Health Resources; D006297:Health Services Accessibility; D006801:Humans; D012807:Sierra Leone