The Government of Côte d’Ivoire is firmly committed to ensuring equitable access to quality health services to achieve Universal Health Coverage. Within this momentum, the country has received support from the GFF (Global Financing Facility) to strengthen high-impact priority interventions. In collaboration with Bluesquare, this strategic support now accompanies the management of Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, Child, and Adolescent Health (RMNCAH) through a key innovation: the automation of strategic reporting.
Every quarter, decision-makers at the Ministry of Health in Côte d’Ivoire now receive an automatically generated strategic bulletin presenting key indicators for maternal, newborn, and child health.
EWithin a few pages, they can immediately see:
They can also compare these trends across the country’s different regions, allowing for the rapid identification of areas where health services are progressing—and those where additional efforts are needed. This information, previously scattered across several systems and reports, is now automatically consolidated and analyzed.
This system, implemented through the support of the GFF and the collaboration between the Ministry of Health and Bluesquare, improves how data is used to steer public RMNCAH policies.
Examples of indicators from automatic quarterly bulletins
The objective is simple: to provide decision-makers with a clear and rapid vision of the health situation to guide investments and interventions.
As in many countries, the health information system produces a vast amount of data. Health facilities report their activities in DHIS2, while other systems track medical inputs or specific programs.
But for decision-makers, this information often remains difficult to exploit. Data is spread across several systems, structured differently, and analyzed separately. Producing a strategic report often requires extracting data from multiple platforms, harmonizing it, and rebuilding the analyses. This work heavily mobilizes technical teams, increases the risk of error, and slows down trend analysis. The data exists, but it is rarely available in a format directly usable for guiding decisions.
The challenge, therefore, is not the absence of data, but the capacity to rapidly transform it into strategic information to manage the health system.
To meet this challenge, Bluesquare worked with the Ministry of Health to set up an infrastructure allowing for the automatic integration and exploitation of data from several systems. This approach relies notably on OpenHEXA, an open-source platform designed to facilitate the interoperability of health data. Data from different sources is automatically retrieved, harmonized, and consolidated. It then feeds into an automated quarterly bulletin dedicated to maternal and child health indicators, formatted and received directly in the inboxes of decision-makers. Funding from the GFF supported the development of this system and accompanied its use within the framework of monitoring the Investment Case for health.
Thanks to this automation, indicators no longer need to be compiled manually. They are generated directly from health system data and presented in a readable format for decision-makers.
The strategic bulletin allows health system officials to quickly understand the evolution of maternal and child health services. The indicators presented cover the entire continuum of care: from pregnancy to child immunization. Decision-makers can thus monitor access to prenatal consultations, specifically:
These indicators can be analyzed at the national level but also by region, allowing for the rapid identification of territorial disparities. Officials can thus pinpoint areas where progress is rapid, as well as those where access to services remains limited.
The automation of this reporting transforms how data is used in the health system. Ministry teams spend less time compiling data and more time analyzing trends and guiding interventions.
Decision-makers also have faster and more reliable information. They can more easily identify regions where prenatal consultations remain insufficient, monitor the progress of programs aimed at increasing assisted births, or detect warning signals regarding the health of newborns. Rather than navigating between multiple databases and reports, they now have a synthesized and updated view of the country’s health situation.
Data thus becomes a true tool for managing the health system, rather than a simple reporting exercise.
Many countries already have health information systems and large quantities of data. The challenge is often transforming this data into information that is truly useful for decision-making.
The experience led in Côte d’Ivoire shows that it is possible to achieve this by combining data integration, the automation of information flows, and the production of strategic reports adapted to the needs of decision-makers. The objective is notably to gradually expand the indicators monitored in these reports and to increase the frequency of bulletin publication to further strengthen the responsiveness of health program management.
By transforming scattered data into directly actionable information, this type of approach strengthens the management of maternal, neonatal, and child health programs and improves the capacity of health systems to guide their public policies based on reliable data.
