NTHC Leads in Integrating Government Information Systems

December 21, 2011 1:23 am | by Aliyah Lou Evangelista | Posted in News

Quezon City, Philippines-The National Telehealth Center (NTHC)-University of the Philippines Manila garnered representatives from national agencies to map the next steps in integrating government-based information system. The meeting is a follow-through from the recent Inter-Agency Interoperability Workshop hosted by NTHC last November.

Representatives from Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), Department of Education (DepEd), Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG),  Department of Health (DOH) and the National Anti-Poverty Commission (NAPC) shared their thoughts on how to position this interoperability plan at the national level.

“In order to push through with this system, there should be someone who’ll commit for the project (and) that, must be recognized by the government,” said Mr. Erwin Yumping, DepEd Education Specialist. Yumping expressed that the lack of government policy caused previous efforts in unifying government information systems to fail. As a response, agencies agreed that a concept paper detailing the government’s mandate on the project will be drafted by the group. Thereafter, NAPC will present this to different agencies to push forth for an executive order from the Palace.

NTHC volunteered as the project’s secretariat to consolidate inputs for the concept paper. Though national agencies have existing systems in the interfacing,  no standard platform is being used for interoperability to take place. Research on efforts to integrate data management systems since the time of President Fidel V. Ramos are currently being done.

Ms. Girlie Zara, DILG Operations Officer V, volunteered that DILG’s Local Government Performance Monitoring System (LGPMS) be used as a hub for integrating databases of different agencies for the interoperability plan. However it was raised that platform which will be used for collecting the data must be first settled.

This initiative is a part of NTHC’s rCHITS project with United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). The project aims to use the Community Health Information Tracking System (CHITS) in collecting a single data set to be used for the interoperability.