Zambia Digital Community Health Project (ZDCHP)¶

Phase Two to Phase Four Implementation

1. Introduction¶

The Zambia Digital Community Health Project (ZDCHP) is a three-year initiative funded by a $3.4 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The project aims to support the growth and modernization of Zambia's community health system. Launched in November 2021, the project has four intermediate outcomes:
• Architecture/design defined for digital community health system.
• Evidence generation through pilots.
• Robust scaling/national rollout plan that all stakeholders are aligned on and that locks in future funding sources for sustainability.
• Talent plan for increased capacity at the Ministry of Health (MoH), supported with non- governmental partners to coordinate digital community health implementation.
Once achieved, these outcomes will produce a functional, user-oriented CHiP with prioritized disease condition data collection modules that the MoH leads, pilots and begins to scale with funding from multiple sources, and will ultimately contribute to lowering the burden of disease through increased coverage and quality of care.

2. Background¶

Zambia has a long history of community health workers (CHWs) playing a vital role in delivering primary health care. However, the CHW workforce is under-resourced and lacks access to essential tools and information. This has led to disparities in health outcomes, with those living in rural areas and marginalized communities often being the most affected.

The ZDCHP aims to address these challenges by developing a digital community health system that will provide CHWs with the tools and information they need to deliver high-quality care. The system will be designed to be interoperable with other digital health platforms in Zambia, ensuring that data is shared and used effectively to improve health outcomes.

3. ProjectStrategy¶

The ZDCHP uses a phased approach to achieve its goals and objectives. The first phase of the project focused on defining the architecture and design of the digital community health system. This involved conducting a series of consultations with CHWs, health care providers, Ministry of Health programmatic staff and other stakeholders to understand their needs and priorities with regard to community health services.

The second to fourth phase of the project will focus on generating evidence on the effectiveness of the digital community health system through pilots in selected districts. The pilots will test the system's functionality and usability and collect data on its impact on health outcomes.

4. Current Status¶

The ZDCHP has now entered the second and third phase of implementation. In the second and third phase, the ZDCHP is working with various sub partners, as summarized below, to develop and deploy the Community Health Information Platform in selected facilities across Katete, Ndola, Mpongwe, Kazungula and Lusaka Districts.

• ArguSoft: They will develop the main digital community health platform as well as a supplementary optical character recognition solution. This solution will be integrated with the HMIS and other key digital health solutions.

• QED: They will develop an optical character recognition solution aimed at helping to assess where an OCR is a more sustainable solution.

• Digital Treasure: They are a local digital firm who will support implementation of the above solutions and capacity building with MoH.

• Busara: They will independently monitor and evaluate the implementation of the Community Health Information Platform. Please see attached proposal. We will be happy to receive your feedback on what additional questions you would like Busara to answer in the evaluation. Busara will be supported by a local monitoring and evaluation firm whose contracting should be completed before the end of the month. Busara will be supported by a local monitoring and firm.

• D-Tree: They will develop a five-year implementation and sustainability plan for the Community Health Information Platform. The implementation and sustainability plan will serve as a resource mobilization strategy as well as a high-level guide for implementing the CHIP beyond the initial facilities.