Policy Information Management System

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Policy Management system for the Health Ministry.

 

Itech

 

 

About

I-TECH (International Training and Education Center for Health) is a global network that works with local partners to develop skilled health care workers and strong national health systems in resource-limited countries. I-TECH promotes local ownership to sustain effective health systems.

I-TECH partners with Ministries of Health in more than 12 countries and several US-based and international universities. It also implements programming in close partnership with several international NGOs (e.g., Lighthouse Trust in Malawi, ZACH in Zimbabwe), and civil society in more than 20 countries.

The initiative was found by many organizations, for example, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) National Institutes of Health (NIH), The CDC Foundation, USAID, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

I-TECH works with 15 core and 40 affiliated faculty at the University of Washington.

 

Challenge

There are medical documents that are being created by the National Department of Health of South Africa, such as official recommendations, regulations, policies, and strategies. Every document is prepared by a group of experts. All of them are involved in the whole policy process and should have access to it in order to improve the transparency and efficiency of it.

The solution should allow team members to share draft documents related to policies they are working on among themselves and both external and internal reviewers. The whole workflow is conducted step by step and the current state and artifacts should be presented to the involved stakeholders. Once the policy is finished it should be published.

Published policies will be made available to the public through a Policy Portal available on the internet, where the public can browse, search for, and download any of the published policies.

 

Solution

The solution – Policy Information Management System (PIMS) project- is a system based on the Alfresco platform which allows managing the documents uploaded to the system. Our solution is an overlay to the Alfresco which adds management of the policy process stages and teams. There is a role-based access control system implemented.

When the whole policy process is completed, an artifact is published by uploading to a separate server which is an external part of the system (Policy Portal) based on Drupal CMS. Active Directory integration allows existing Active Directory users to log in to the PIMS system.

 

Result

I-TECH will continue to support the National Department of Health in the process of strengthening the policy management and implementation systems with a focus on reaching the 95-95-95 targets.

I-TECH will continue to provide technical assistance as the NDoH beta tests the policy information management system (PIMS) developed in COP 2017. I-TECH will revise and finalize a Policy Manual and coordinate the NDoH Policy Project Steering Committee to promote engagement from NDoH staff.

 

Technologies used

The Policy Management system is built on top of the Alfresco opens source platform. Technologies used there are Java, Spring, Jquery Freemarker, and custom Alfresco based frameworks. The public-facing Policy Portal is built using Drupal and integrates with the Policy Management system.

Both of the systems can be deployed using Docker.

 

 

Spring logo php7Drupal new logo

java logodocker-logo-med_3 jquery

 

 


 

 

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