In March 2008, when I joined as the Director of MIS of DGHS under the MOHFW of Bangladesh. I am sharing some snapshots of the MIS building of that time. The look was very poor.
It was a pale and old infrastructure requiring huge repair and upgradation. There was no Internet connectivity. Paper forms were used for data collection. There was no alternate power supply. Work environment was very poor. The staffs were unskilled, neglected and frustrated. The average time to get field data, after compilation at each hierarchy was 2 months.
We seriously felt need for transforming. Why?
- To improve health systems efficiency
- To bridge urban-rural digital divide
- To reach the citizens with service
How?
- Through building quicker data & information communication system
- Through improving information culture – data collection, analysis and use.
We were lucky! Coincidentally, GoB adopted a “Digital Bangladesh Vision 2009”.
We had strong confidence about success of the work we were doing. We had passion and we did hard work. We created an positive environment through team building, empowerment and inspiration.
We started with the basic technology. Over time, some were evolved – some were replaced.
The technology solution we adapted had some characteristics;
- Simple: to enable implementation without much difficulty with low skilled staff
- Low cost: to make affordable to implement and scale
- Innovative: to draw attention of people, policy makers, and media for support
- Locally appropriate: to make feasible to implement effectively in Bangladesh context of that time, viz., frequent power outage, slow interrupted Internet speed, shortage of hardware and software, low skilled staff, acute shortage of human resource and staff workload
- Visible: to make the implementation and results believable
- Scalable: To enable scaling downward at the shortage possible time.
We improved the physical facility, established high end digital training facility, established state of the art health data center with disaster recovery center, and scaled the Internet network down to community health workers in a short period of time. Results, reputation and recognitions came.
The stories under this blog series describe our progress over time.