HISP Strategy

On 1 January 2022, the HISP project at the University of Oslo (UiO) became the HISP Centre at UiO. The HISP Centre is an interdisciplinary center that promotes research, innovation and capacity building in digital global health and related areas, helping low- and middle-income countries to deploy digital tools to monitor public health, combat and prevent pandemics, and manage treatment programs for severe illnesses like Malaria, Tuberculosis, and HIV.

The HISP center works in partnership with national and international actors including Norad, the Global Fund, the Gates Foundation, PEPFAR, the CDC, Gavi, Unicef, and the WHO — with a combined investment of more than USD $21 million for 2022 — on the continued development, implementation and use of the open-source DHIS2 software as a Digital Public Good. Through this work, the HISP Centre supports the achievement of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly in relation to good health and wellbeing and quality education.

Action-oriented information systems research has been at the heart of HISP since the beginning. Through action research — including system design, software development, and implementation support — we explore real-world problems, develop solutions in a local context, and use the knowledge gained to generate generic solutions that can be shared globally. Our holistic approach to action research has been the driving force behind our success.

The way forward

The HISP Centre’s work is guided by underlying principles and a collaborative approach that has remained constant since the beginning. These are supplemented by strategic documents and business plans that help us prioritize our work within the organization, plan our approaches to new domains, and identify and mitigate risks and challenges. The year 2022 marked the end of the three-year period covered by the previous HISP strategy update. Over the course of the year, we reflected on the work we had done – including how our strategy had prepared us to respond to the challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic – and drafted our strategy update for 2023-2025.

One key element of this strategy is responding to the increasing interest in DHIS2 beyond its established use in the health domain, including in priority sectors such as education, as well as cross-cutting public sector use cases. This idea of DHIS2 as a generic, multi-sector software platform is supported by our software development vision. In the coming years, we plan to make DHIS2 more flexible and customizable, increase support for integration and interoperability, and facilitate creation and distribution of custom applications and components, positioning DHIS2 as an extensible platform and an ecosystem for innovation.

Our strategy for the coming three years re-emphasizes the three core pillars of the HISP model – software design, action research and implementation support/capacity building – while identifying six key priority areas on which we will focus our work in the years to come: 

  • Strengthen in-country capacity: Strengthen, promote and share the HISP model for building country and regional capacity to build mature and sustainable national information systems.
  • Architecture & Interoperability: Support locally driven architecture, direct our efforts towards realizing the use value of integration, and facilitate and influence health information system architecture and interoperability. 
  • Data Use: Facilitate increased national and sub-national data use as well as building analytical capacity.
  • Health & Beyond: Develop mature approaches to leveraging DHIS2 to support SDGs in and beyond the health sector. Respond to country demand to explore the use of DHIS2 as a platform for cross-sector e-governance. 
  • Innovation Sharing: Facilitate local innovation, community collaboration, and reuse.
  • Communicating Results: Improve evaluation, documentation and visibility of DHIS2 and HISP impact.