Like in many developing countries, office absenteeism of the health staff from work was a long time problem. To alleviate the problem, in all hospitals and academic institutions, from national to sub-district levels of Bangladesh, office attendance monitoring system using biometric finger-print detection has been installed. The system records date and time of arrival to and leaving from office of the officers and staffs and allows reading from the head quarter. The system is integrated with the Human Resource Information System, and data are displayed real time in the dashboard of MIS-DGHS, the facility-wise summary for public viewing and details for viewing by the health managers and policy makers.
Prior to introduction of this biometric system, we performed the office attendance monitoring through a monitoring cell established in MIS-DGHS, which used another ICT based mechanism. The process used land phone, mobile phone and web-camera. Hospitals were chosen randomly and called by land or mobile phone. The respondents were asked how many staffs were actually present in the office. To confirm presence, selected staffs were asked to proof presence by standing in front of web-camera. The names of unauthorized absentees were informed to ministry for administrative actions. This simple mechanism improved office attendance by a remarkable percentage.