Introduction

iHRIS Qualify is a training, certification and licensure system that collects and aggregates data on a complete cadre of health care workers in a country from pre-service training through attrition. The system is typically managed by the licensing or certification authority for a health worker cadre, such as nurses or physicians. The database captures information about health professionals from the time they enter training through registration and licensure, and it is updated every time a professional's license or certification is renewed. iHRIS Qualify can also track continuing medical education credit hours attained by health workers, capture data about foreign-trained workers applying to work within the country and record out migration verification requests. Thus, it provides a country-level picture of a cadre of health workers, whether in training, employed in the public sector or employed in the private sector.

A policy maker can analyze the data captured by iHRIS Qualify to answer critical human resources for health policy and management questions, such as the following:

How many trained students pass the certification/accreditation exam?
Of the students who pass the exam, how many register to practice?
How many health workers are deployed in each region and where are they working?
How many health workers are working in the public sector, private sector or both?
Are health professionals meeting their continuing education requirements?
For what reasons are health workers out migrating to work in other countries?

iHRIS Qualify is intended for use by a health cadre licensing or certification authority. This authority is generally an autonomous council that regulates the registration, operations and conduct of a cadre of medical professionals within a country's health workforce. The council may be charged with enforcing minimum qualifications for students entering health training programs, administering national-level examinations that qualify a graduating student to practice within the country, maintaining licenses for health professionals that are renewed periodically, verifying that continuing medical education requirements have been completed before renewing licenses, issuing private practice licenses to qualified health professionals, verifying qualifications of foreign-trained health workers applying to work within the country and verifying qualifications of health workers applying to work in foreign countries. The council would use iHRIS Qualify to capture, update and report on data from all of these activities.

Typically, there are separate authorities to regulate doctors, dentists, nurses, pharmacists and allied health professionals. Each separate authority would maintain its own iHRIS Qualify system, but data from all systems may be aggregated to provide a complete picture of the country's health workforce.