Ciheb Holds Workshop for Partners, Stakeholders on NDR Implementation in Nigeria

Ciheb Nigeria, in collaboration with the Federal Ministry of Health (FMOH), recently facilitated a three-day workshop for implementing partners (IPs), key stakeholders, and other parties of interest in the health sector to improve user education, understanding, and efficiency at all levels of the National Data Repository (NDR) implementation.

The workshop ran from June 9-11, 2021.

The NDR is a de-identified patient-level database that provides near real-time monitoring of the HIV program in Nigeria and allows for deeper and more comprehensive analyses of patient treatment status, progress, histories, and outcomes that continue to guide decision-making towards achieving HIV epidemic control in the country.

The training also focused on strengthening stakeholders’ capacity to accurately identify and upload information within patient electronic medical records (EMRs) into the NDR, decrypt validation feedback received from the NDR, and understand how the indicators available on the NDR dashboards are calculated. The training also oriented participants on the implementation of the patient matching process in the NDR using existing biometric data.

Participants at the workshop included representatives from FMOH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), USAID, and other stakeholders.

"We participated in what the CDC at that time referred to as NDR exploratory visits to the various CDC states across the country. At the facility and state levels, we discovered a lot of gaps in terms of user education on how the NDR works, what it is supposed to do, and how to troubleshoot concurrence issues between data from EMRs and data on the NDR. Thinking through how to fix these, we came up with what we have now tagged the NDR workshop to expand on what the NDR is, problems it has solved, how to effectively use it, and how to troubleshoot issues with getting data correctly unto the platform."

- Alhassan Abdulkadir, Head of Department, Health Informatics at Ciheb Nigeria

Workshop attendees came from a variety of government, non-profit, and civil society organizations.

Alhassan Abdulkadir, the head of the Department of Health Informatics at Ciheb Nigeria, further stated that next year Ciheb and its partners will cascade the knowledge to state and facility levels across the country. “It’s a big thing, a really big thing," Abdulkadir said. "We are talking about eventually covering over 2,000 facilities and training potentially between 4,000-5,000 people.”

According to Abdulkadir, the NDR is currently able to ingest data for multiple HIV program areas, including treatment, HIV testing services, recency testing, and prevention of mother-to-child transmission. He noted that there exists a national alignment of program and resources between President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), Global Fund, and the Government of Nigeria.

Likewise, participants at the workshop lauded the effort and expressed optimism that the knowledge gained would improve their interactions with the NDR platform.

“The training went very well, especially for health informatics folks like myself,” said Amos Aniwange, technical officer of health informatics from FHI 360. “It was very interesting because we dug down into the NDR implementation guide. We got to understand most of the things we did not understand, or we were not privileged to understand, before now.

"We are willing to go back and have a stepdown training for people that are not here, just so that we may have correct synergy between our IPs and UMB, and we know that it can go a long way to strengthen our interactions with the NDR platform. We recommend that this kind of training should often come up because it has been very impactful and we’ve learned a lot.”