Community of Practice in Practice: Successful Implementation of Integrated Community Health Information Systems

For a long time, the Malawi health sector community level was using paper-based tools. However, the huge impact of the data generated at the lowest level of the health sector in performance monitoring, decision making, planning and measuring progress prompted the need to have digital solutions. When digital tools were introduced; most of them were only addressing a single functionality or programme, resulting with a lot of fragmentation and siloed systems. Therefore, most of the information systems in place are not holistic, what is missing is information systems that are integrated in nature, encompassing all the patient and programmes data. The Malawi MoH through the Community Health Services Section (CHSS) in collaboration with other departments is implementing an integrated community health information system (iCHIS), resting upon an open-source, web-based platform – DHIS2. The goal of this paper is to discuss the role that different communities of practice (CoP) played in the different phases of iCHIS development and implementation. Drawing on case material from several CoPs in the Malawi health sector community level, a case is built around the use of CoPs, arguing that if the different communities are well coordinated and collaborated, they will be able to enhance the integration of the community health information system. In this paper, we analyzed how the interaction of different CoPs have led to the successful implementation of the integrated community health information system (iCHIS) in the Malawi health sector. Five CoPs were identified namely: policy makers, developers, users, facilitators and supervisors CoPs.