DHIS2 for Climate & Health
Progress report: Innovative tools, new partnerships & updates from 10 pilot countries
It’s been a busy 9 months since we launched the DHIS2 for Climate & Health project in March 2024! Thanks to financial support from the Wellcome Trust and active collaboration with local and global partners, the HISP network has been able to make significant progress in a short period of time. As the year draws to a close, we wanted to share some key updates on our work and how you can partner with us to support climate-resilient health systems in low and middle-income countries.
Innovative, open-source tools for climate and health analysis
At the core of the DHIS2 for Climate & Health project is the potential of leveraging the local DHIS2 systems, capacity, and years of digitized health data that countries already have, and combining it with climate, weather, and environmental data to help identify, predict, and respond to climate-related health threats, including the increasing spread of infectious diseases and illnesses and health impacts related to heat, drought, flooding, air pollution, and other environmental factors. To make this possible in DHIS2, HISP UiO has developed these innovative tools:
- DHIS2 Climate App: Lets you import granular data on temperature, precipitation, humidity, heat and cold stress, weather forecasts, and historical climate change (and more to come), and automatically harmonize it with your DHIS2 organisation units.
- CHAP (Climate Health Analytics Platform): A collaborative and open platform for importing, training, tuning, assessing, and sharing predictive models for climate-informed disease forecasting, which works with DHIS2 and as a standalone tool.
- DHIS2 Prediction App: Pilot app for DHIS2 that provides seamless integration with CHAP, providing a user-friendly interface within DHIS2 for selecting data to use to generate and visualize predictions.
Watch our recent webinar to get an overview of these tools, and visit the CHAP webpage for detailed documentation and links to get involved with CHAP.
Partnering with climate and health experts
To ensure that our work draws on state of the art research and the global body of knowledge on climate and health, we have initiated formal partnerships with three leading research groups:
- Barcelona Supercomputing Center: HISP is working with the Global Health Resilience group, under the leadership of Dr. Rachel Lowe, on predictive modeling of climate-sensitive infectious diseases, with an initial focus on dengue in Lao PDR.
- Columbia Climate School: HISP has partnered with the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), and will work with them on connecting DHIS2 to local weather data sources through existing IRI data libraries, beginning in Malawi and Rwanda, and building local capacity for using climate data.
- CICERO Center for International Climate Research: HISP is collaborating with CICERO to support integration of air pollution data into DHIS2, including data from local devices and global data sets, and development of air pollution and heat risk mapping solutions, with Sri Lanka identified as an initial focus country.
We are also working to formalize partnerships with several international organizations, NGOs, and research groups working on climate and health projects in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. If you are interested in connecting or partnering with us, send us an email at climate@dhis2.org
Making progress on the ground in 10 countries
A key element in our climate and health project is the HISP network. Local HISP groups in 10 countries have drawn on their longstanding partnerships with Ministries of Health to and extensive knowledge of local DHIS2 systems and health information architectures to help create engagement around the potential of DHIS2 for Climate & Health, facilitate discussions on data sharing between health and climate stakeholders, and work with health program experts and other local partners to design and implement solutions that address local data needs.
HISP groups are actively collaborating on local projects in Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Laos, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. Here are some key accomplishments from our work in 2024:
- Data sharing agreements in 9 of 10 countries between Ministries of Health and National Meteorology Agencies, overcoming a key barrier to climate and health data integration.
- Climate App installed on local DHIS2 systems in 10 countries, with four using the app in production and six on a test/development instance.
- 4 countries actively testing predictive modeling with CHAP with support from local HISP groups and HISP UiO, including one group that was able to install and run CHAP independently, using only the guidance we have published on the CHAP website.
- Liaising with WHO country offices on EWARS in Laos, Malawi, and Nepal to support DHIS2 data integration and explore potential leveraging CHAP.
- Engaging Ministries of Health on disease programs, depending on specific priorities of the MoH in each country, including environmental health (WASH), outbreak forecasting (malaria, yellow fever, dengue), climate-related vector distribution (malaria), water-borne diseases (cholera), nutrition, integrated heat and air quality analysis (NCDs), One Health, and flood early warning.
There is still a lot of work to be done at country level, including working with health programs to identify actionable climate impacts and design relevant data outputs, testing and refinement of predictive models, capacity building and scale up, as well as engagement with additional partners to find synergies and reduce duplication of effort and siloed approaches. To engage with us at the country level, contact us at climate@dhis2.org
If you have any questions or comments on the DHIS2 for Climate & Health project, or have updates on your work in this area that you would like to share, you’re welcome to add a comment here to let us know!
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