Iaso
Iaso
Iaso is an open source data collection, campaign monitoring and facility registry solution used mainly in health, currently in use in performance-based financing projects, polio campaigns tracking, facility registries and support to World Food Programme beneficiaries tracking. Iaso provides a number of core features in support of continuous geospatial data management: a mobile application, a web dashboard, a matching feature to merge various data sources, a data science and scripting interface and a seamless bi-directional integration with DHIS2. Here are some of the features:
- Structured data collection using the xlsform format as its core, but adding entities and org units (Ã la DHIS2)
- Managing as many referential lists as you want
- Facilitating the continuous data management of the master lists
- Easy to use by multiple teams in parallel
- Data sciences in support of georegistry management
- Fine grained geography based accesses and traceability
- Planning pre-campaign micro-planification survey from team dispatch coverage to survey design
Iaso tries to fill a gap in the digital health ecosystem by providing at the same time features as a georegistry (holding the GIS referential, and improving it), large scale data collection (the brunt of the work) and planification (allocate, using the GIS referential, data collection tasks to do).
Approach
Iaso’s strong integration with DHIS2, with tools to setup data exports with matching interface, and a very lightweight mobile application based on ODK makes it an interesting candidate for data collections where data is ultimately analyzed in DHIS2. Another focus of the tool is on microplanning activities for campaigns (e.g. MDA or vaccination) where the aim is to provide planification tools, with the corresponding monitoring of activities. The tool includes out of the box user management with clear access rights based on hierarchical geographies, and this is leveraged to allow organization of country wide planification effort, with each region being able to handle its own planning and monitoring. The primary users of Iaso are ministries of Health, NGOs, WHO, Institute of Statistics, all institutions involved in doing data collection related to locations (typically, statistics that need to be collected offline, then aggregated on a regional level).
Implementations
Iaso was first created for a project in DRC to gather data about community health worker where it is still used. It was then adopted to perform data collection for performance-based financing in at least ten countries, with thousands of users. In many of these countries (Uganda, Burundi, Ivory Coast), Iaso is in the process of hosting the software locally to ensure the sustainability of the projects. Iaso has also been used as a georegistry tool for the Ministries of health of DRC and Niger to update the master facility list of these two countries.
Now, it is being used as the platform to encode data about polio vaccination campaigns at WHO Afro and to prepare maps allowing to follow the scope of these campaigns: [1]. Finally, it has been picked by the World Food Programme as the base on which to build their new conditional on-demand assistance tool, with support for beneficiaries and complex workflows involving mobile devices and NFC cards.