Monitoring and evaluation platform for HEARTS in the Americas: improving population-based hypertension control programs in primary health care

• Published in: Revista Panamericana de Salud Pública
• Main Authors: Patric Prado, Angelo Gamarra, Libardo Rodriguez, Jeffrey Brettler, Margaret Farrell, Maria E. Girola, Taraleen Malcolm, Ramon Martinez, Virginia Molina, Andrew E. Moran, Dinesh Neupane, Andres Rosende, Yamilé Valdés González, Qaiser Mukhtar, Pedro Ordunez
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English; Spanish; Portuguese
• Published: Pan American Health Organization 2022
• Subjects: hypertension; cardiovascular diseases; health surveillance system; ehealth strategies; americas; Medicine; R; Arctic medicine. Tropical medicine; RC955-962; Public aspects of medicine; RA1-1270; Arctic
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.26633/RPSP.2022.161; https://doaj.org/article/7fb41abfaffb41efa91fd7e704b65ede

HEARTS in the Americas is the Pan American Health Organization flagship program to accelerate the reduction of the cardiovascular disease (CVD) burden by improving hypertension control and CVD secondary prevention in primary health care. A monitoring and evaluation (M&E) platform is needed for program implementation, benchmarking, and informing policy-makers. This paper describes the conceptual bases of the HEARTS M&E platform including software design principles, contextualization of data collection modules, data structure, reporting, and visualization. The District Health Information Software 2 (DHIS2) web-based platform was chosen to implement aggregate data entry of CVD outcome, process, and structural risk factor indicators. In addition, PowerBI was chosen for data visualization and dashboarding for the analysis of performance and trends above the health care facility level. The development of this new information platform was focused on primary health care facility data entry, timely data reporting, visualizations, and ultimately active use of data to drive decision-making for equitable program implementation and improved quality of care. Additionally, lessons learnt and programmatic considerations were assessed through the experience of the M&E software development. Building political will and support is essential to developing and deploying a flexible platform in multiple countries which is contextually specific to the needs of various stakeholders and levels of the health care system. The HEARTS M&E platform supports program implementation and reveals structural and managerial limitations and care gaps. The HEARTS M&E platform will be central to monitoring and driving further population-level improvements in CVD and other noncommunicable disease-related health.