The Health Information Systems Program (HISP), India, is an important node in the global HISP network initiated by the University of Oslo, Norway in 1994. This network, now globally acknowledged to be a premier one of its kind, currently includes various countries such as South Africa, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Tanzania (including Zanzibar), Botswana, Malawi, Nigeria, Zambia, India and Vietnam. The HISP network seeks to strengthen Health Information Systems (HIS) within these countries through five key mechanisms: design, development, and implementation of free and open source software; directly working with the health services in respective countries to deploy HIS within their health services to strengthen the informational basis for public health care delivery; large scale and intensive capacity building for health staff at all levels with a key focus on “using information to support local action”, and also through formalized professional masters programs in HMIS; institutional development at the national and state levels around M&E activities for MDG4; and, the international sharing of best practices by drawing upon and contributing to HIS related knowledge across developing countries.  HISP India was initiated in 1999 in Andhra Pradesh, and over time has been expanded, and is now active in the following states: Kerala, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh, and soon also starting in Karnataka. A key objective of HISP is to support the activities of the Department of Health in their efforts to strengthen their health information, and integrate it more strongly with health care delivery. These activities are being carried out through the design, development and implementation of open source and not for profit software, large scale training of health staff at different levels, and feeding back findings from research from the global HISP network and HIS research more generally to try and benchmark HISP India with global standards.

HISP is based on a philosophy of action research, where the focus is on introducing change and supporting health reforms on the ground, through creating strong and meaningful linkages with processes of education and research. As such, HISP globally, and also HISP India can be seen to be built around three pillars of introducing change on the ground in HIS, education, and research. HISP globally is comprised of more that 15 doctoral students who come from different parts of the world including South Africa, Mozambique, Norway, Ethiopia, Tanzania, UK and India. The educational background of these students is also very varied ranging from Informatics, Medicine, Anthropology and Development Studies. Though education and research are tightly interconnected, we describe them separately to distinguish between Masters and Doctoral studies. We have had a number of Masters students from Oslo who have done the empirical component of their Masters thesis in Andhra Pradesh. Through their research, they have contributed and contributing significantly to the progress of the project.