A shift towards decentralization in many low-income countries has meant more skills are demanded of primary health care managers, including data and information handling at all levels of the health care system. Ministries of Health are changing their central reporting health information systems to health management information systems with emphasis on managers utilizing information at the point...

OBJECTIVES To summarize excellent current research in the field of Health Information Systems. METHOD Synopsis of the articles selected for the IMIA Yearbook 2008. RESULTS HIS is a broad field that includes many fruitful areas of research and development. Some current topics were selected for this IMIA yearbook. CONCLUSIONS The best paper selection of articles on health information system...

Public health practice is an information business. Over the past few decades, information systems have become foundational for the practice of public health at the local, state, and federal levels. These developments have enhanced surveillance practice and routine and emergency response, along with improving the efficiency of day-to-day operations of health agencies at all levels. Despite these...

With the introduction of large scale health information systems which are incrementally developed from legacy systems, evaluators are faced with difficult methodological and practical problems. Some of the problems involved in multidisciplinary multi-method evaluations care discussed. It is argued that the development of a framework for evaluation is necessary in order to successfully plan an e...

BACKGROUND Efforts to tackle the enormous burden of ill-health in low-income countries are hampered by weak health information infrastructures that do not support appropriate planning and resource allocation. For health information systems to function well, a reliable inventory of health service providers is critical. The spatial referencing of service providers to allow their representation in...

Health information systems (HISs) hold the promise to transform health care; however, their adoption is challenged. We have developed the Clinical Adoption Meta-Model (CAMM) to help describe processes and possible challenges with clinical adoption. The CAMM, developed through an action research study to evaluate a provincial HIS, is a temporal model with four dimensions: availability, use, beha...