BACKGROUND: HIV programs in Sub-Saharan Africa have been highly successful in institutionalizing and scaling up quality improvement (QI) to expand access to and improve quality of HIV services. Digital health technology needs to be harnessed in order to increase the use and impact of QI data. To that end, EGPAF developed the Quality Improvement Project Monitoring (QI-PM) application to digitize the formerly paper-based process of monitoring QI projects at EGPAF-supported health care facilities.
DESCRIPTION: QI teams at health care facilities in Sub-Saharan African countries enter data about their site’s QI projects, including the changes to be tested and results of key indicator performance, into the QI-PM web or mobile application available for iOS or Android. Data in the application is periodically updated by the health care facility QI teams, who use the application’s in-built data visualizations to track how the QI project contributes to changes in key performance indicators over time.
LESSONS LEARNED: From 2017 through December 2022, teams from nine countries entered 1,151 QI projects into the QI-PM application. Projects aim to improve performance on 157 key performance indicators and strengthen the quality of services across 35 programmatic areas that span the HIV continuum of care. Descriptions of 1,515 changes tested by 282 health care facilities were documented in QI-PM. By implementing QI-PM, QI teams have more efficiently documented the activities and results of QI projects at health care facilities, and effectively utilized digital data management platforms to store and visualize QI data. This work has culminated into a centralized, multi-country repository of data on QI tested changes that informs improved quality of services offered to people living with and affected by HIV while fostering cross-country exchange of promising practices.
CONCLUSIONS: The QI-PM application can be feasibly implemented by health care facilities across countries to digitize QI. Future integration of the application with a major data management platform, such as DHIS2, could make QI-PM even more accessible to facilities across the globe seeking an easily adoptable solution to digitize tracking of QI projects related to HIV and other fields.

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