Digital health has become a leading field in employing standard and innovative information and communications technology (ICT) to address health needs. In light of these developments, the Iraqi Ministry of Health (MoH) plans to introduce several digital health tools to improve the quality and coverage of service solutions and improve reporting and planning for these services.
UNICEF Iraq supports the digitalization of health services in Iraq through several approaches. The two main areas of support focus on digitalizing birth registration in the country and linking it to immunization programs in all primary health centers so that the health system can track and follow up on the status of all children. This would reduce the number of zero-dose children and help track children’s status at any service delivery point.
In alignment with the continuous improvement and strengthening of the immunization system as part of the health system in Iraq, UNICEF is supporting the MoH Directorate of Planning and Directorate of Public Health by providing IT training and a capacity-building program on Microsoft ASP .Net Core for the MoH IT team (8 participants). The program will provide the MoH IT team with the programming skills they need to develop the Digital Birth Registration System.
The training program will focus on building the Digital Birth Registration System for the Biostatistics Department in the Directorate of Planning to digitalize/automate the current data flow and process of birth registration. The system will be designed to link two entities (birth registration offices with health centers) through one platform with various hierarchies and roles. Furthermore, it will generate a unified coding system to provide a national health identity that will be used to establish an eHealth system, health records, and civil registration.
In line with the above and under the collaboration between the MOH and UNICEF Iraq, ISEET organized a 15-day workshop titled “How to Use .Net Core Programming Language to Develop Web Applications from Beginner to Advance” in Baghdad, Iraq, between April 30 and May 18, 2023.
The workshop aimed to train participants on ASP.Net environment administration through ASP.NET Core Training. Upon completing the workshop, participants could develop C# applications using ASP.NET Core and Model Views and Controllers (MVC) using Visual Studio and create C# ASP.NET Core MVC web applications. The workshop also aimed to familiarize participants with the programming language by practicing the main techniques used in object-oriented programming and defining and applying HTML and MVC concepts.
During the workshop, participants were introduced to Microsoft web technologies, the history of Asp.net Core, and MCV. Participants received comprehensive training on Asp.net, web forms, ASP.NET Core MVC Using SQL database, ASP.NET Core MVC CRUD, filling dropdown lists using Entity Framework Core (EFC), Asp.Net Core Web API, web API verbs, endpoint, routing, as well as consuming APIs.
This workshop is the first of four workshops that will be conducted to train the MoH IT team on Microsoft .Net Core to develop a digital birth registration system for Iraq. Subsequently, ongoing online remote support and mentoring will be provided to the MoH team during the system development phase.
During the workshop, several meetings and discussions were held to review the current DBR system and discuss how ASP.NET Core technology could be utilized to digitalize it. The MoH team provided the existing DBR process, data flow, and other supporting documents to inform the business analysis phase and new DBR system development.
On May 18th, a closing ceremony event was organized by the Director General of the Department of Planning and Resource Development/MoH office, Dr. Tawfik Walid Tawfik. The ceremony was presided over by Dr. Kenan Hussein Ali, Director of the Health and Biostatistics Department, and attended by Dr. Alaa Rahi from UNICEF, the ISEET team, the trainer, and all participants. During the event, Dr. Kenan briefly explained the project’s goals and objectives and how it would address current challenges and support digitalization and data digitization at MoH. The event concluded with the handing out certificates of completion to all participants.