06 JULY 2016 NHISSA MEETING mHEALTH REGISTRY M.J. NKGAPELE

BACKGROUND mHealth in South Africa like in all developing countries, is experiencing an unprecedented uptake. However, there is no coordination of mhealth projects from National Department of Health except the developed eHealth Strategy and mHealth Strategy. As a result, there are many players in the field which the Department has no sense of who is who Most mHealth projects are donor-driven hence the need to provide for the creation of transparent repository for mHealth projects 2

BENEFITS OF THE REGISTRY Apart from overall implementation, the registry will ensure scalability of projects It will ensure coordination of projects for maximum benefit. It will increases efficiencies and reduce unnecessary duplication of efforts It will give a clear picture of the landscape and pick up challenges and aspects to further maximise projects sustainability 3

DEVELOPMENT PROCESS At NHISSA meeting in 2015, MEASURE Evaluation SIFSA, a National Department of Health (NDoH) development partner, proposed to assist the Department in the developing the registry. At the meeting with the NDoH IT Directorate, the latter indicated that it did not have human resource capacity to develop the registry but will assist with provision of server to host the registry and administration issues. The IT Directorate also advised that the Departmental webmaster be approach with the registry uploading request, and that was done. 4

SYSTEM’S DEVELOPMENT PROGRESS The system's development is two weeks into the process but the end product need to reflect where the NDoH wants to go. This is an open source system which is capable of customising the template, a two-way tool capable of updates and to give feedback and is not an end in itself. One of the proposed functionality is the dashboard to facilitate ease of view on categories of projects based on their area of service provision e.g. Nutrition. The monitoring ability will flag issues that need to be addressed, reviews, outstanding information, sending of reminders, updates, calendars, data traffic management, detection of active and non- active projects, etc. On security aspects, measures against loss of data, will be taken. 5

THE SYSTEM A word template with fields that new and existing mHealth projects must fill in to register was developed. However, in order to automate and publish the template on the Departmental website, a software is necessary to host and ensure this interaction. MEASURE Evaluation SIFSA then contracted DataCraft Software Consulting CC as the expert in this field. A preliminary work on the software has been done and the registry (with the template loaded to the system) is under development. A meeting with the NDoH was held to outline how far the developments. 6

TEMPLATE 7

WAYFORWARD The system's handover will be done two months after its launch on the Departmental server- with source code, skills transfer and documentation. Prior to handover, there will be a half day demonstration to relevant administrators on technical issues, further support and escalation of issues. There needs to be a follow-up meeting with NDoH IT for a dry run and ensure the server space is available and active as promised. The specification document and a link where the registry template resides will be sent to NDoH and to be shared with IT Directorate. The template must further be amended to include information such as: the liaison section and official the project interacts with in the NDoH. The development of a mhealth registry is an ongoing initiative and to be continually improved and updated, with data representing snapshot of all mHealth projects in time. 8

SOUTH AFRICAN MHEALTH PROJECT LANDSCAPE South African mHealth Project Landscape Survey was conducted in August 2015 The survey recommended that mHealth registry be an ongoing initiative and be continually improved and updated, with data presented representing a snapshot in time, focused on public sector initiatives. While projects can be registered at any time, it was proposed that the registry be actively updated twice a year (follow up phone calls, actively ing existing stakeholders etc). The focus for the next “snapshot” should be to include more projects in the private sector and present more complete data on technology providers. It was also proposed that additional data should also be collected to further support specific other activities in the mHealth Strategy, for example, data relating to interoperability. 9

MHEALTH DONORS 10

MHEALTH TECHNOLOGY PROVIDERS 11

MHEALTH IMPLEMENTING ORGANISATION 12

LIST OF MHEALTH PROJECTS 13

THANK YOU 14