Mozambique witnessed the go-live of the first DIGIT Health DPI, locally called Salama in August 2023; becoming the pioneer of setting up Digital Public Infrastructure for health campaigns. Accessible to all the stakeholders of Mozambique, over 2.6 million bednets were distributed to over 314,000 households, covering a population of 4.7 million people. It wasn’t just about handing out bednets; it was also about using real-time data to make data-driven decisions. The DIGIT Health Campaign Management (HCM) Dashboard acted as a hub of operations, enabling teams to track progress, resolve issues quickly, and ensure the campaign’s success.
“With Salama, we had real-time visibility. You can see, we can see the coverage of households, you can see the people who worked, who was in the field, the performance of the team. We can see even every data from every village.”
Dr. Baltazar Candrinho,
Director of Mozambique National Malaria Control Programme.
The DPI approach for health campaigns
This was fundamentally possible due to DIGIT’s DPI approach to public health campaigns. The DPI approach provides a unified source of truth, a departure from the typical application based approach where data is fragmented in multiple systems.
- Data is fragmented in multiple system leading to poor data quality and lack of integrated data for decision making
- Poor experience for employees, citizens and administrators leading to poor adoption.
- Point to point integration between system will lead to spaghetti code making system difficult to change.
- Shared Data Repository ensures “Single Source of Truth” and controls data quality.
- Integrated Portals and Dashboards for employees, citizens and administrators ease of use and adoption.
- Well defined APIs and messaging bus ensures interoperability and ease of integration without compromising the modularity and future evolution of individual services.
Co-Creating DIGIT Health DPI with Reusable Building Blocks
DIGIT Health DPI was truly a convergence of the collective. Partnerships formed the backbone of this rollout. In the weeks leading up to the bednet campaign, the Ministry of Health, Mozambique (MISAU) and the National Malaria Control Program (NMCP), team worked closely with the eGov team to customize and configure DIGIT Health DPI to their specific processes, language and information that they would like to capture. This was possible due to configurable building blocks, that makes it easy to operate.
The interoperability of the platform with systems such as DHIS2 and eLMIS enables seamless integration, making it an invaluable asset for governments.
Our program partners, World Vision , were crucial in helping implement this campaign and Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) partnered with the eGov Team to capture specific needs through workshops, field trips, and interviews. An advocacy approach was used to drive campaign momentum.
Reimagining possibilities on DIGIT Health DPI
Mozambique’s campaign is just the beginning. MISAU, Mozambique is extending DIGIT Health DPI, Salama across multiple provinces and campaigns for Seasonal Malaria Chemoprevention (SMC) which is planned in Nampula from January – April 2024. Through this campaign, NMCP aims to cover ~1.3M children under 5 years across 23 districts. Liberia, too, has a nationwide bednet campaign planned for early 2024. The vision goes even further: DIGIT HCM aims to be adopted in 30 countries over the next three years, ushering in a new era of digital health infrastructure.
With every data point collected, every bednet distributed, and every life saved, DIGIT Health DPI is a story of reimagined possibilities and the beginning of “Malaria Fora” (Malaria Out) and more such health interventions.
