DHIS

DHIS is the acronym for the District Health Information System, which is the software being developed by the Health Information Systems Programme (HISP) project.

The District Health Information Software is a highly flexible, open-source Health Management Information System and “Data Warehouse” solution covering aggregated routine data, semi-permanent data (staffing, equipment, infrastructure, population estimates), survey/audit data, and certain types of case-based on patient-based data (for instance disease notification or patient satisfaction surveys). The system supports the capture of data linked to any level in the Organisational Hierarchy, any data collection frequency, a high degree of customisation at both the input and output side. It is multi-language enabled and has been translated into a number of languages.

The DHIS was originally developed for three health districts in Cape Town in 1998-99, but has since spread via the Health Information Systems Programme (HISP) network to nearly half of sub-Saharan Africa – currently used in countries with 300-400 mill people – and to a number of countries in Asia. The initial scope - routine monthly PHC data – has systematically been expanded to cover nearly all aspects of health data and information (excluding Electronic Health Records). Available aggregated data for South Africa from 1998-2007, for instance, represent close to one billion patient encounters.

DHIS is available in several release:
 * DHIS 1.3
 * DHIS 1.4
 * DHIS 2.0

Developing
DHIS 2 is being developed as an open source alternative to the earlier releases which based on Microsoft software. The software development process is a global collaboration between students, researchers and experienced developers in Norway, India, South Africa, Ethiopia and Vietnam.

The DHIS 2.0 is developed using the Open Source Java frameworks and tools: The Spring Framework, Hibernate, WebWork, Maven, and JUnit.