DHIS


The District Health Information Software is used in more than 60 countries around the world. DHIS is an open source software platform for reporting, analysis and dissemination of data for all health programs, developed by the Health Information Systems Programme. The core development activities of the DHIS 2 platform are coordinated by the Department of Informatics at the University of Oslo, and supported by NORAD, PEPFAR, The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, UNICEF and the University of Oslo.
The solution covers aggregated data, and event data. The system supports the capture of data linked to any level in an organisational hierarchy, any data collection frequency, a high degree of customisation at both the input and output side. DHIS 2 comes with easy to use analytics through tailored Dashboards, charts, pivot tables and maps, and can be extended with Apps or used by third-party software through the open Web-API. It has been translated into a number of languages.
The DHIS was originally developed for three health districts in Cape Town in 1998-99, but has since spread via the HISP network to more than 40 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin-America. The initial scope - routine monthly Primary Health Center data – has systematically been expanded to cover nearly all aspects of health data and information, and recently been used by other sectors such as Education, Water and Sanitation, Forestry, and Food Security.

Versions and releases

DHIS is available in several versions:
The DHIS version 1 series goes back to 1996 and was developed on the Microsoft Access platform consisting of VBA for the interface or program logic, Access as a database, Excel for reporting and Windows as the OS. DHIS 1.4 is a significant overhaul of the version 1.3 database structure, using various output formats for reporting. It bridges the gap between DHIS 1.3 and 2.

DHIS 2

DHIS 2 is a continuation of DHIS version 1 developed on open source Java technologies and available as an online web application. The first release, version 2.0, came in February 2008 after three years of development releases, and the most recent version is 2.33. DHIS 2 is developed using open-source Java frameworks and tools, such as the Spring Framework, Hibernate, Struts2, Maven, and JUnit. Follow the latest DHIS 2 development on , and read more on the .