The Ongoing Journey to a Master Facility Registry in Ethiopia

Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned

  • This initiative is resource intensive in terms of maintaining service domain data and capacity building. 
  • To update and maintain the MFR data content, there is a need to balance basic data needs of consumers against cost of effort.
  • MFR is one of the shared services in the Ethiopia eHealth Architecture and mostly used by other health information systems to exchange health facility related data. There is a need to increase visibility and create awareness at a higher management level on the importance of the system
  • There is a need to design an incentive mechanism to maintain quality and up-to-date health facility data 
| To serve the Ethiopian population of 100 million people, over 21 thousand public health facilities have been established. |

In Ethiopia, the eHealth Architecture is widely accepted and there are clear procedures on health facility registry and licensing, both of which have allowed a functional MFR to be integrated to the eHealth systems. The team involved used the existing lists of health facilities from DHIS2, service provision assessment surveys, and LMIS to populate the MFR with signature data elements (facility names, unique IDs, basic services, etc.).

The process of developing the MFR started with requirement identification by a Technical Worker Group (TWG) made up of members from the Ethiopia Ministry of Health and other partners. User stories on curation, interoperability, and data exchange were utilized in developing the framework. An analysis was conducted by stakeholders to define how they use data sources and the platform in the Ministry of Health, Regional Health Bureau, and various agencies, partners, general public, and universities.