 Welcome to this course on planning and budgeting in DHS2 implementations. This course was created because implementing DHS2 as a software platform is actually quite complicated. It's not as simple as simply installing a piece of software. There are a lot of pieces that are involved that can be technical based on the country's infrastructure, based on the people involved in the system. And so it requires a fairly detailed approach to planning. Also in many low and middle income countries, there are actually several different organizations that are involved than using DHS2 that may be working on it separately. So it's useful to have a coordinated framework in which to understand DHS2 projects so we can facilitate a common understanding and a common plan for them. And finally, as the HIST network, we've accumulated a lot of knowledge about DHS2 over the years, especially having worked directly with many countries and implementing it. So this course is a way for us to share our knowledge with the broader community. So what will you learn in this course? First, you'll learn about the context in which DHS2 is most commonly used, which is the health context. It is the world's most widely used health management information system, but it can also be used for individual health programs and for a context outside of the health system. You'll learn about the different roles, responsibilities, and capacity building needs of the people who work with DHS2. People are essential to ensure the system's governance stability and long-term relevance in a context. And you also identify the main activities and best practices for planning and budgeting for large-scale DHS2 implementations. So this course is for people who are responsible for working on DHS2 plans and budgets. That could be public health and monitoring and evaluation specialists. In the context of the Global Fund Organization, that could be health product management specialists or similar roles in other organizations, program officers, or anyone else with that kind of work responsibility. And this could be either for writing or creating those plans and budgets or assessing them to make sure that they are relevant and complete. And as I mentioned before, while this course does focus primarily on the health context, it can be applied to other kinds of contexts in which DHS2 is used. As for the structure of the course, we've divided it up into three main parts or modules. First, we'll look at DHS2's capabilities as a software platform and the demands in which it's used, looking specifically at the health sector, but also some applications beyond health. Second, we'll look at the people who work with DHS2 and how that work can be structured. This includes governance of a system, capacity building, and support for DHS2 implementations. And finally, we'll look at implementation considerations for DHS2, ranging from everything from infrastructure to hosting to planning and budgeting and how our best practices were carrying out those activities. So let's look at that in more detail. In part one, DHS2 capabilities and demands, we'll start off by explaining a bit about what a health management information system is and how it's used. So what its purposes, what its characteristics are, what a basic architecture of the health management information system is. And we'll also look at the kind of data types that go into this. And you might have learned some of this already in the introduction to DHS2 course. We'll give you a refresher and expand upon that information. And we'll also talk about how the DHS2 software platform can be extended both within the health system and beyond it. We'll look at standards-based configuration, which is an approach to applying global standards to a DHS2 implementation. We'll look at how DHS2 can be used in a logistics and supply chain context, which is another area of information that is commonly needed to have a robust health management information system. And then we'll explore topics of data use and data quality and how DHS2 can support those. Part two is working with DHS2. And here, again, we'll be talking primarily about people. So people are really at the heart of DHS2. It's not just about software. It's about the people who set up, use, and maintain that software. We'll talk about principles of governance, and we'll introduce our three-part governance model, which you can see here, including a governance committee, operational management, and a core technical team. We'll then talk about how to define and build that core DHS2 team. We'll also explore health programs and the data users in those programs. A key part of building a DHS2 system is configuring it for those users and making sure they have access to it. Related to that, we'll talk about capacity building, both for the core technical team, health programs, and other users of DHS2. And then we'll talk about the role of the HIST network in supporting DHS2 implementation and capacity building and other activities. And in part three, implementation considerations, we'll go through a range of topics. Starting with readiness, and here it'll be introduced to the concept of the readiness assessment, which you can see an example of here on screen. We'll also talk about privacy and security, which are important considerations with DHS2 since we're dealing with health data. That also includes a section on security and risk management, which is also an important consideration when using any enterprise-level software system. We'll talk about devices, infrastructure, and hosting, and what the different considerations are for DHS2 systems, including differences between aggregate and tracker systems, and the use of mobile devices for mobile and offline data capture. We'll then explore how you can update the DHS2 system, including the DHS2 roadmap process, which is how new features are introduced to the software, and options for extending DHS2, including various means that can include developing and maintaining custom applications and what the long-term considerations for that are. Then we'll talk about long-term considerations in general, what needs to be done to effectively monitor and maintain DHS2 systems over time. And we'll wrap this up with a summary of budgeting considerations, introducing a budget framework for DHS2 implementations. So budgeting is a particularly important part of the planning process, and to help reinforce the knowledge in that area, we've included special slides throughout the course that specifically list considerations for budgeting for the different topics that are being addressed in different sessions of the course. So as you go through, you'll see these slides that say project management, impact on project budget, and they'll list different considerations, cost drivers, ways to think about that material for different implementation types like aggregate versus tracker, and reminders to help plan for recurring costs and not initial costs. Throughout the course, we've also included various learning resources to help reinforce some of the topics that we're addressing. These include links to additional information or resources such as the readiness assessment tool or the budget framework. They also include regular knowledge check questions for each session of the course. These can be multiple choice, they can be drag and drop interactions. The goal is to reinforce the material that you've learned in that session. At the end of each module of the course, there's a graded quiz. And there are also summary checklists that you can download and use as work guides. And finally, we have a special discussion forum just for this course where we can go and interact with other students and help share ideas and learnings across countries and across domains. And this is also very important for us that this is a course in development. All of our courses are designed to address the needs of people actually working with DHS2, and it's important for us to know whether they're relevant and whether they are complete. So we really appreciate as you go through the course, if you take the few minutes to provide your feedback to us and help us improve the course for future versions. Thank you for joining us on the DHS2 Online Academy. We hope that you enjoy this course on planning and budgeting DHS2 implementations.