For more than a decade, health teams in over 40 countries have improved their performance using MSH’s Leadership Development Program [4] (LDP) and the latest version, Leadership Development Program Plus [5] (LDP+), which improves public health impact and scale-up. During the same period, there has been a tremendous expansion of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in health and mHealth interventions, particularly using mobile devices. This past year, two MSH-led projects—the Prevention Organizational Systems AIDS Care and Treatment (Pro-ACT) project [6] in Nigeria and The Leadership, Management & Governance (LMG) Project [7]—collaborated with LMG partner Medic Mobile [8] to pair the LDP+ [9] with a mobile application to systematically capture, collate, and report LDP+ results in near-real-time.

When in 1995 entrepreneur Jeff Bezos launched Amazon.com from his garage in Seattle (USA), fewer than 1 in 200 people worldwide had internet access and online shopping was just a year old. Today, Bezos’ innovative website has made Amazon.com the world’s largest online retailer, with $60 billion in annual sales – $170 million a day. Online shoppers see Amazon.com as their primary interface—this is the technology innovation. Amazon.com and its accompanying vast information technology capabilities can predict what we want. It catalogues our searches and purchases, and gives us suggestions of what we want.

A brilliant example of the power of technology innovation – right? Only half right. What we don’t see is actually more profound: it’s the power of partnering technology innovation and systems innovation. If you thought Amazon’s secret sauce was simply the technology innovation, think again. In fact, it’s the systems innovation that makes Amazon work. 

Systems model: Amazon.comGraphic by MSH

Cross-posted from the K4Health blog [18]. 

No matter which health system building block you are trying to improve, you need specific data, information, and knowledge to inform your decision-making process—this is where good knowledge management comes in handy.

“The Intersection of Knowledge Management and Health Systems Strengthening: Implications from the Malawi Knowledge for Health Demonstration Project [19]” provides an interesting case study of the connection between improved knowledge management and health systems strengthening.