Encouraging Private Provider Reporting into National Health Information Systems - Operations Research

Background:

Ghana implemented the District Health Information Management System 2 (DHIMS 2) nationwide to aid the reporting of routine health data and facilitate planning and decision-making. While implementation has largely been successful, as of June 2019 less than half of registered private health facilities providing clinical services reported into DHIMS 2. Complete public and private sector reporting into the DHMIS 2 is critical for the government of Ghana.

Together, both the SHOPS and SHOPS Plus projects held a workshop with the Ghana Health Service (GHS), the Health Facilities Regulatory Agency (HeFRA), and private sector health providers to identify barriers to reporting and propose potential solutions. Reasons for lack of reporting include lack of training, low availability of paper forms, and inconsistent facilitative supervision. Workshop participants identified quarterly facilitative supervision to private facilities jointly by the GHS and HeFRA as one potential solution that would be both sustainable and appropriate. SHOPS Plus conducted a randomized control trial (RCT) to evaluate the effectiveness of quarterly facilitative supervision on data reporting. To our knowledge, this is the first study of this nature.

Objectives/research questions: The objective of this study was to determine if facilitative supervision by the GHS and HeFRA increases the reporting rates and reporting quality of private clinical facilities into the DHIMS 2 platform. The specific research questions were:

• Are quarterly supervision visits associated with improved (1) completeness and (2) on time reporting into the DHIMS 2 platform among private health facilities offering clinical services?
• Are quarterly supervision visits are associated with improved quality of data reporting into the DHMIS 2 platform?

Methods:

To answer these questions, SHOPS Plus conducted a RCT with 150 facilities selected at random from a list of 193 facilities whose data managers were trained on DHIMS 2 reporting by GHS. Of these 150 facilities, the study team randomly assigned 75 to receive ‘quarterly supervision visits’ and 75 to receive supervision visits per usual practice. The study was conducted in the Accra, Kumasi and Sekondi - Takoradi metropolitan areas in the respective Greater Accra, Ashanti and Western regions of Ghana.

Status: Completed
Last Updated: October 2020
 

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