Human Resource Information System implementation readiness in the Ethiopian health sector: a cross-sectional study

Abstract

BackgroundHealth workforce information systems in low-income countries tend to be defective with poor relationship to information sources. Human Resource Information System (HRIS) is currently in a pilot implementation phase in the Federal Ministry of Health and Regional Health Bureaus of Ethiopia. Before scaling up the implementation, it is important to understand the implementation readiness of hospitals and health departments. The aims of this study were to assess the readiness for HRIS implementation, identify associated factors, and explore the implementation challenges in public hospitals and health departments of the Amhara National Regional State, Ethiopia.MethodsAn institution-based cross-sectional study supplemented with a qualitative study was conducted from the 15th of February to the 30th of March 2016 in 19 public hospitals and health departments of the Amhara National Regional State, Ethiopia. A self-administered questionnaire was used to collect the data. The questionnaire includes items on socio-demographic characteristics and questions measuring technical, personal, and organizational factors adapted from the 32-item questionnaire of the Management Science for Health (MSH) HRIS readiness assessment tool. The data were entered and analyzed with statistical software. Descriptive statistics and bivariate and multivariable logistic regression analyses were performed. Odds ratios with 95% confidence interval were computed to identify the factors statistically associated with readiness of HRIS implementation. In-depth interviews and observation checklists were used to collect qualitative data. Thematic content analysis was used to analyze the qualitative data.ResultA total of 246 human resource (HR) employees and 16 key informants have been included in the study. The HR employee’s level of readiness for HRIS implementation in this study was 35.8%. Employee’s Internet access (AOR = 2.59, 95%CI = 1.19, 5.62), availability of separate HR section (AOR = 8.08, 95%CI = 3.69, 17.70), basic computer skills (AOR = 6.74, 95%CI = 2.75, 16.56), and fear of unemployment (AOR = 2.83, 95%CI = 1.27, 6.32) were associated with readiness of HRIS implementation. Poor logistic supply, lack of competency, poor commitment, and shortage of finance were the challenges of HRIS implementation.ConclusionIn this study, readiness of HRIS implementation was low. Strategies targeting to improve skills, awareness, and attitude of HR employees would facilitate the implementation process.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s12960-017-0259-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

A practical measure of health facility efficiency: an innovation in the application of routine health information to determine health worker productivity in Ethiopia

“…This research aims to examine the relationship between the size and composition of the health workforce (input) and the volume of service utilization (output) of Health Centers (HCs) from three regions of Ethiopia: Addis Ababa, Oromiya, and Southern Nations, Nationalities and People's Region (SNNPR). We used secondary data of Ethiopian Fiscal Year 2009 (Gregorian Calendar 2016) from three sources: the HMIS for outputs [17], Human Resource Information System (HRIS) for inputs and facility attributes [18,19], and subnational-level (woreda or district) population projections of Ethiopia from the US Census Bureau's International Data Base [20].…”

“…The HRIS reports the number of all types of healthcare workers posted in each HC at the beginning and the end of the fiscal year [18]. We identified 2005 HCs from the three regions and retrieved the health workforce information at the beginning of the fiscal year 2016, along with the name and geographical locations of the HCs.…”

Human resource technology disruptions and their implications for human resources management in healthcare organizations

“…Each health organization will need to make an independent judgement regarding HR practices to be supported by HRIS, the type of HRIS to adopt, appropriate timing, and what stakeholders to involve in these projects. However, these decisions should be based not only on the availability of funding or conformity with lead-users, but also on the objectives specific to the organization in question, its preparedness to embrace these technologies [56], on context-specific environmental, organizational and individual factors, and on the evidence-base informing their development, implementation or use. Thus this evidence-base needs to be enlarged and enriched as soon as possible.…”

“…In the light of these considerations we need the collaboration of the academics and practitioners in developing new “programs of interdisciplinary research, encompassing economic evaluations, sociotechnical analyses, studies of information flows, and systematic assessments of the impacts of better workforce information on health care efficiency, quality, safety, and patient care, as well as new exploratory research to understand the value of information for driving analytics in support of sustainable and effective health systems” [9]. In the meantime, HRIS projects in healthcare should carefully pilot and evaluate incorporation of these technologies into complex health work practices in a way which take into consideration the readiness and maturity of individual organizations, [56] to including context-specific environmental, organizational and individual factors [48]. Moreover, the decision to adopt any particular type of HRIS should be considered with a clear eye on the specific organizational objective, whether this be an aspiration to collect accurate data on HRH (thus implying the adoption of core HRIS), or a desire either to introduce or to further transform strategic HR practices (demanding the adoption of performance management and recruitment HR modules, or even some disruptive HR technologies).…”

“Planned Benefits” Can Be Misleading in Digital Transformation Projects: Insights From a Case Study of Human Resource Information Systems Implementation in Healthcare

“…We therefore recommended that future HRIS projects in complex organizations consider benefits not only at the level of the IT system as a whole, but also at the level of individual modules and user groups, as these systems can be used by a wide variety of stakeholders in health organizations (e.g., Tursunbayeva et al, 2016). This is also because in nationalscale projects involving multiple implementation sites, readiness to adopt IS (Dilu et al, 2017), as well as strategies adopted for their implementation (as was the case in this project) can vary widely. For example, some RHOs already had experience with similar modules, while for others they were entirely new.…”