The Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS), the implementation agency of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare of Bangladesh, is moving forward to provide universal health coverage for over 160 million people through its national health programme.
As health systems of the country evolved, care delivery has become fragmented across the various points of service, making it hard for data to be harmonized, for healthcare personnel to share information and knowledge, and also collaborate while providing care. The existence of incongruent health information has appeared as one of the major blockers in the nation’s ability to provide healthcare to every citizen.
Making a Difference
To take Bangladesh one step closer to universal health coverage for its citizens, the DGHS under the leadership of Professor Abdul Kalam Azad, Additional Director General (Administration) and Director (Management Information Systems), partnered with ThoughtWorks. The goal was to create a Health Information Exchange (HIE). The HIE’s primary objective is the continuous integration, aggregation and communication of healthcare information using electronic patient records, starting from the ground-up.
ThoughtWorks designed the system based on OpenHIE, an enabler of large-scale health information interoperability