India's health information now on a portal

New Delhi: The Government of India on Tuesday launched the Health Management Information System (HMIS) portal to convert local health data into real time useful information, management indicators and trends which could be displayed graphically in the reports.

Portal for a healthy India/ Photo credit: www.nrhm-mis.nic.in

Launching the portal, Health and Family Welfare Secretary Naresh
Dayal said that real time data provided by the web-enabled
technologies will strengthen the monitoring and would enable policy makers to make better decisions for public health delivery.

The new system envisages enhancing the information flow at various levels and providing useful and timely inputs for programme
development, monitoring and midcourse interventions in the policies.

Recognising the need for an information base, one of the core
strategies of the strengthening capacities for data collection,
assessment and review for evidence based planning, monitoring and supervision, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has
established this dedicated portal for all public health related
information.

The HMIS portal captures data to be collected as per the revised HMIS formats on a web-based system at the District level so that the primary data can be easily aggregated and the information and reports flow quickly to the state head quarters and the Ministry.

The system also enables information to be entered for each facility
so that MIS reporting can be of a better quality.

The application has been developed by the Ministry in technical
collaboration with iBILT Technologies who will also be providing
maintenance and support to the application for the next five years.

The portal will be generating unique intelligence reports using the
advanced SAS Data Warehousing platform and explore and establish new linkages and advanced analysis for policy initiatives.