Study of a Health Information System pilot project in Tanzania

Abstract

This thesis is based on an action research project in Tanzania where I, together with two other researchers have participated in the deployment of health information system. The project was initiated in Tanzania on an early stage at Bagamoyo and now we introduce it to Dar-Es-Salaam. The project group is part of HISP, an international effort to bring sustainable health information systems to third world countries. HISP is a global research and development network focusing on developing the network and the accompanying software DHIS. HISP/DHIS started in South Africa and has since been deployed both as a health sector approach and as software to a number of other developing countries.

My initial research goal included a participatory approach based on action-research, interviews and observations to gather data. The efforts to adapt HISP and DHIS to the Tanzanian environment have had a lot of different challenges which is to a large degree different to the ones I would meet in my known context. The adaptation of the HISP approach to the Tanzanian health service seemed less a problem than making people within the Tanzanian HISP network to move in the same direction.

I argue that information systems in developing countries as well as western must take into account its social context and the social implication an IS has on the environment in which it is present. I also do an attempt to put part of the empirical data into an actor-network theory story to better describe the notion of interacting of the actors in the HISP network in Tanzania.