Digital Health Platforms for AMR Data Integration Across Africa
The DHIS2-AMR platform, deployed across 25 African countries, enables the integration of antibiotic resistance data into national health information systems for the first time. A decisive step toward data-driven decision making.
Integrating antimicrobial resistance data into national health information systems represents a major challenge for African countries. Most AMR data remain siloed in paper-based hospital registers or research databases inaccessible to policymakers. The DHIS2-AMR platform, developed in collaboration with the University of Oslo and Africa CDC, aims to solve this problem by integrating a dedicated AMR module into the DHIS2 system, already used by over 40 African countries for routine health surveillance.
The DHIS2-AMR module allows microbiology laboratories to enter antibiogram results directly into the national system, automatically generating standardized surveillance reports compliant with WHO's GLASS (Global Antimicrobial Resistance and Use Surveillance System) framework. Interactive dashboards provide public health officials with a real-time overview of resistance trends in their country.
Dr. Bob Jolliffe, lead architect of DHIS2, emphasized that "one of the greatest obstacles to combating AMR in Africa is not the lack of data, but the inability to transform it into actionable information for decision-making. DHIS2-AMR solves this problem by placing AMR data at the heart of the national health information system."
Since its pilot launch in 2024, the module has been deployed in 25 countries and now integrates data from over 300 laboratories. The first countries to adopt it — Kenya, Tanzania, and Ethiopia — report significant improvement in the quality and completeness of their annual GLASS reports. Africa CDC aims for deployment across all 55 AU member states by 2029.
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