There is a universal desire among donors, NGOs, CBOs and most government agencies to enhance multi-sectoral coordination in addressing major health challenges. At the same time, almost all systems devoted to information collection for large scale health programs are vertically oriented: i.e. information is provided to a reporting hierarchy and seldom shared for effective decision-making, particularly at the levels where programs are actually implemented. The Community Based Intervention System (CBIS) is designed as a reciprocal system where data is provided and shared at the levels where programs are implemented in order to enhance program coordination efforts and expose logical partnerships for collaboration.

CBIS Objectives

The CBIS intends to provide users with a tool that answers the following basic question:

Who is doing What intervention Where and How are they doing it?

The components of this question consist of the following:

Who is conducting the interventions? Through the creation of a user-sustained Resource Registry the CBIS provides access to essential information concerning organizations and their ongoing programs.

What intervention are they using and what are they trying to achieve? CBIS provides a resource to all organizations so that the goals throughout a region are understood and everyone has an opportunity to identify their organization’s efforts with the achievement of objectives that are related to these goals. This is a first step towards implementing program measures that are logically linked to program goals and creating an evaluation framework with program measure histories that is stored for future use.

Where are they conducting their interventions? CBIS will enable local CBOs to visualize where each intervention is taking place in order to promote optimization of resources, base interventions on population data and help indicate logical collaborations among functionally and geographically related CBOs.

How are they going to conduct each intervention? CBIS will be integrated with SCOPE an online resource that provides a step by step procedure for addressing basic questions on program implementation, intervention design, while support long term collaboration. With the incorporation of an evaluation component CBIS can also be prepared to follow up the question of “How they conduct each intervention” – with “were they successful or not?”

Because the focus of CBIS is the community the initial deployment has targeted urban areas such as Baltimore City where the prototype was developed and in Addis Ababa where development has begun. Because the focus is on urban areas regional survey data becomes more relevant for decision making. In Ethiopia socio-demographic data from the Ethiopian Census and morbidity data from the ANC HIV Survey can be shared at the kebele, or sub-city level as a shared map for program implementers to use. As a recent joint Federal HIV/AIDS Prevention & Control Office and World Bank report observed:

Trying to produce "single" estimates [of HIV prevalence] for the entire country has little relevance for understanding the scale and heterogeneity of the epidemic. Therefore, HIV/AIDS programs should not be based on national-level statistics, but need to be more focused geographically, and directed to those regions, districts or communities exhibiting higher prevalence rates. This will necessitate conducting research and disaggregating data to the district level in order to identify hot spots and communities at higher risk. (HIV /AIDS in Ethiopia An Epidemiological Synthesis April 2009)

CBIS provides a base map from which layers can be added to allow users to visualize interventions in relation to any existing morbidity data. Additionally, program information is maintained by the organization conducting the intervention rather than by a disinterested third party or data collector. Because of the need to ensure the respect of peer organizations it is hoped that both the quality and consistency of the reporting is improved over previous vertically oriented systems.

Combined with a social networking function, CBIS seeks to exploit the use of the Internet and matchmaking technologies in the development of social capital that is directed towards the creation and maintenance of an active network of health agents that includes the community based organizations, local and national health agencies, research institutions and donors. Better resource allocation, improved service coordination and more effective health interventions will result from providing an effective means for collective action. Through the innovative use of technologies, such as vector-based mapping and “rich client” technologies, that accommodate the development of accessible interface designs for the non-expert, CBIS can provide a web based resource that creates a network of organized reciprocity for effective program implementation.

For further information, visit the links to the video tutorials for CBIS:

The social networking piece of CBIS

The project registration piece