Project: Country Health Information Platform (CHIP)

Country Health Information Platform: A nationally managed data product to improve access to longitudinal data through the ESPEN platform

The project aims to build a neglected tropical disease (NTD) reporting tool, referred to as CHIP. This will integrate with the ESPEN Portal to extract and visualise yearly district level data on NTD morbidity, MDA treatments, and disease prevalence status.

Why is this important?

Access to high quality and timely data is crucial to the successful delivery of any NTD programme. Many programmes do not have access to a national NTD database due to cost and limited technical capacity. Often the only data available is what is submitted in annual drug donation and reporting submissions in Microsoft Excel files, making it difficult to compare and visualize data over time. This makes it challenging to evaluate programme performance and plan for impact assessments, thereby increasing the risk of delays in achieving global elimination goals.

Innovation

Using a human centred design approach, CHIP will be built using business intelligence software and will serve as a centralised NTD reporting tool. Rather than building a NTD database from scratch, it will be populated with data from the ESPEN Portal using an application programming interface (API). In simple terms, this allows two applications to share data. A design plan will be drawn up in consultation with NTD staff and a CHIP prototype developed. This will then be tested and the platform updated in response to user feedback. To accompany the platform, training materials will be developed and a trainer of trainer’s session rolled out to promote adoption.    .

Key Details

  • Organization: Sightsavers
  • Geography: DRC, Guinea, Kenya, and Malawi
  • Timeline: October 2020 – September 2021
  • Budget: £106,000

Expected Impact

The direct beneficiaries of the CHIP database will be NTD programme managers and data managers at the national, regional, and district levels. It is expected to improve the ability of programme staff to use their data for programmatic decision making. As it will be populated with data from the officially submitted Joint Application Package (JAP) and Trachoma Elimination Monitoring Forms (TEMF), there will be more users reviewing these data which will help to identify errors. It is expected that this review will build demand for high quality submissions and therefore improve the quality of official data

Future Learning

Users will be able to share their experiences of using the tool with other countries to showcase how CHIP can help answer key programmatic questions, such as trends in MDA treatments over time. The tool will be officially launched at the 2021 ESPEN NTD Programme Managers Meeting to share it with the broader NTD community. The benefit of CHIP, should it be successful, is the opportunity to scale this solution to all countries in the African region.