Last week, the HRH Global Resource Center launched its new eLearning program through an online event hosted from Chapel Hill, NC, and highlighted the program’s first course, iHRIS Administrator: Level 1. The eLearning program is part of IntraHealth International’s strategy to promote innovative approaches to making knowledge about human resources for health more widely available through its global project, CapacityPlus and other projects.

The first course, iHRIS Administrator: Level 1, aims to meet the expressed need of staff in developing countries to build their capacity in information technology. The course offers participants basic skills to administer and customize CapacityPlus’s human resources information systems (HRIS) software, iHRIS Manage and iHRIS Qualify. The course is based on field-tested training materials and includes lessons, quizzes, audio and video instruction, and transcripts. It fills a gap in training for two critical tools that help countries track and manage the health workforce.

The course was developed by a number of IntraHealth and CapacityPlus staff, and beta testers provided feedback on draft versions. At the University of Dar es Salaam’s Computer Science unit, Dr. Juma Lungo used the draft modules to conduct training for over 60 people. Other beta testers included HRIS interns in Uganda, the Pakistan Nursing Council’s iHRIS administrator, and a student at the University of the Philippines-Manila who is focusing her thesis research on the iHRIS software. In Tanzania, the University of Dar es Salaam and the University of Dodoma plan to offer iHRIS Administrator: Level 1 as part of their computer science curricula.

The HRH Global Resource Center is the CapacityPlus project’s digital library of human resources for health information. It has over 2,700 resources, and nearly 48,000 users on average access the website every month. Future eLearning courses will focus on gender and human resources for health; the Rapid Discrete Choice Experiment tool for health worker recruitment and retention; and monitoring and evaluation for the health workforce.