iCHIS: Transforming Community Health Service Delivery Through Innovation

To ensure innovation addresses real-world challenges and improves lives, the University of Malawi, through its Computing Department, has developed the integrated Community Health Information System (iCHIS), a digital platform transforming community healthcare delivery across Malawi.

iCHIS is a nationwide Ministry of Health and Sanitation (MoHS) platform that supports Health Surveillance Assistants (HSAs) in providing community health services.

Developed by researchers at the University of Malawi in collaboration with MoHS and other partners, iCHIS replaces paper-based records with a modern digital system that enables health workers to collect, access, and manage health information more efficiently and accurately.

According to Dr Kondwani Godwin Munthali, Head of the Computing Department and iCHIS Project Lead, the platform has been deployed in 15 districts nationwide, with 3,764 HSAs and Senior HSAs trained and actively using it to support community health service delivery.

The system strengthens community health management by capturing village demographic information, environmental health conditions, and household-level Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) data.

iCHIS also records individual demographic and health information, including pregnancies and deaths, and links people to essential health programmes and services such as the Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI), family planning, and nutrition etc. This integrated approach promotes continuity of care, strengthens disease surveillance and response. iCHIS also supported the insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) mass distribution campaign in 2024, the first ever nation distribution campaign to be done digitally.

Across Malawi, iCHIS is improving community healthcare by giving health workers standardised clinical decision-making guidance, longitudinal health records, multi-level data access, and patient-level analytics. The platform also gives decision-makers reliable, real-time data to guide planning, resource allocation, and improvements in health service delivery.

By improving quality, accuracy, and availability of health data, iCHIS is making healthcare services more efficient, responsive, and reliable for communities nationwide.

The implementation of iCHIS is part of a broader set of initiatives coordinated by the Computing Department under the HISP UNIMA initiative.

Through HISP UNIMA, the department is supporting MoHS in implementing the Malawi Healthcare Information System (MaHIS), DHIS2 systems, the national Health Management Information System (HMIS), interoperability solutions for data exchange between health information systems, national disease surveillance and reporting systems, and the digitalisation of national health campaigns and public health interventions.

The initiative also supports the development of data analytics and decision-support platforms for MoHS, as well as national digital health governance, policy development, standards implementation, and capacity building for health workers at national, district, and facility levels.