 We're very glad to have you joining us here for the Tracker Planning and Implementation Management Academy. This is a level two academy and we'll go through a little bit of what that means. But first wanted to just give an opportunity to introduce a few of the people that will be facilitating and you'll be hearing from over the course of the next couple of weeks. We have quite an experienced team that have been working with Tracker for some time. You'll hear a lot from different countries and their examples this week. And next week we also have a number of people training on different topics. So maybe I will start with Karolina. Would you like to introduce yourself? Yes, hello and welcome everyone. We're very excited to have you all at this academy. So I'm Caroline Lien. I currently have two roles as a details to project support team lead and a tracker functional analyst. So I'll be mostly watching the Slack, helping out where I can. So remember to always reach out there if there's anything. And yeah, looking forward to a great academy. Great, thank you. Anna, could you go next? Hi, my name is Anna Tursen. I will host a couple of sessions here in the academy regarding planning, budgeting and also a bit of this readiness assessment that you have received earlier, both on the Slack and via email, I think. Day to day I work on several of our larger contracts. I work specifically with immunization and COVID at the moment that also has a tracker component. So looking forward to the academy very much. Thank you. Great, thank you, Anna. Kim, could you please present yourself? Yes, sorry, I'm having trouble with my camera but I'm Kimberly Frost. I am working at the University of Oslo as a clinical specialist, looking at how to use tracker with a clinical perspective, working a lot on the immunization tracker projects and COVID, glad to be here. Great, thank you. There's quite a few other people that you'll be meeting in the next couple of weeks but maybe that's enough to get us started in seeing some of the people that we'll be facilitating. For this academy, we had people signing up from over 60 different countries. So just to recognize that there's quite a lot of diverse use cases and diverse experiences with tracker. So we'll spend a bit of time today going into some of the various ways that people are using tracker and make sure that we all have kind of a shared understanding before we dive into some of the more kind of in-depth topics. But just to give you a sense of what we'll be talking about throughout the course, we have a short slide deck here. The first thing I wanted to say is that this is actually only the second time that we are giving this academy. A little over a year ago, a year and a half ago, we had created the tracker implementation guide and then had the first implementation academy in Ghana in March of 2020. This happened to be right as the COVID epidemic was breaking worldwide. And we ended up being able to do only the first four or five days of this academy and then had to shut the academy down due to the COVID outbreak. So this is for us, the first time now we're repeating this academy. We've updated the materials with all of the things that we've been learning over the last year since that first academy, especially with regards to the COVID implementations and the different challenges as people are using tracker for very large scale vaccine support, vaccine certification, COVID testing, cohort monitoring, many different ways that people have been using tracker. And so we wanna make sure to bring in those considerations that we've learned since that time. So this is an update to the only time we've ever given this academy. To give you a sense of what we're doing here, again, this is not really a strong technical or software focused academy. So we very much want the people that are making decisions about implementation, about how to proceed in their country, whether they already have a tracker implementation or they're planning to do one soon. So we're trying to give an overview of what ways tracker could be used, but also how to think about training and what might be different about IT support and how you would consider approaching the different health programs and what kinds of roles there should be expanded to your team, either an existing DHS2 team or adding DHS2 expertise. We want to give some support around how to plan finances and how to think about the resources that would be associated with your tracker implementation. So again, we're not focused so much on configuration. This is not something where we're going to sign in to DHS2 very often. It's going to be much more about implementation and how to approach planning and how to manage your teams and how to determine readiness and these number of topics. So what we'd like you to be able to leave these two weeks with is the increased ability to plan your tracker implementation. Again, for some of you, that means that you already have an ongoing tracker implementation and this will give you some additional skills and ways to approach managing that implementation. For some of you, you are going to be implementing your first tracker implementation. Perhaps you already have DHS2 experience or experience with other software this way, but this will help you hone in on the specifics around the DHS2 and tracker about what you would need to be considering. We also hope that this is going to lead to an increase in the quality of the tracker implementations. Again, this is something that there has been a lot that we have learned over this last year and over the last five, six years of tracker implementations. Tracker in our estimation is something that is widely used and is quite mature at this point, but there are also many countries that are doing these kinds of projects for the first time where they're really reaching down to the facility level with a reporting system or whether actually trying to do clinical data capture or at the community health level. So what this has been, I think a learning and growth experience for many of us globally over the last five, six years and we'd like to really help improve the quality of implementation and ensure that you're getting the most out of these projects which take a lot of effort, take a lot of resources and demand a lot of the people using them. So we want to make sure that they're of the highest quality implementation. We also will spend a bit of time making sure that you're aware of all the possibilities of how to use tracker. Tracker can be anything from a very simple kind of secondary reporting system where you're simply entering data to a full clinically based tool that is providing decision support and helping clinical health workers play on their day. So there's a wide range of possible complexity, various features that can be used. There are many kind of interesting innovations that various countries and various HIST groups have done to improve on tracker or to use tracker in innovative ways. And again, we'd like to spread that knowledge and make all of you aware of what you could be doing with tracker and see some of the things that might be worth adopting on your end. We are going to have some specific exercises and activities throughout these two weeks. We have one tool in particular which we will share a bit more about tomorrow and which we've got a link to that is to help you do first a readiness assessment for your activity. And again, this may be for an ongoing activity but it's still very useful to sit down and think through kind of the landscape around your tracker implementation. Help you to identify some of the systemic kind of challenges and processes related to tracker, things that you may wanna have mitigation strategies for understanding what the risks are, knowing how to balance those out with the right kind of interventions to take care or mitigate the risks. And try to help you have a better possibility of having a long-term and sustainable implementation around the tracker implementation. So we will spend time particularly today looking at a number of the different use cases, ways the countries are using tracker both in kind of an ecosystem setting and standalone. We're trying to spend time making sure that you know again how others use it, how they take that data and analyze it, how the data coming in from an individual level system differs from perhaps what you've been receiving under aggregate, what kinds of decisions you might be able to make using that data. Also helping to think through capacity building and long-term training and internal capacity. So this is both amongst your actual users of the system and also within your IT support structure. We know there's always with these especially large national scale systems there's quite a lot of turnover and trying to think through how you maintain capacity over time and using the software and supporting the software. There's also long-term maintenance considerations. So often there's a heavy focus at the beginning when introducing tracker and a lot of resources dedicated to rolling out the system. But then if you want the system to last and to be around for a long time there are specific strategies that you can employ to keep your tracker up to date to make sure that it's running well to keep people using it long-term. Ways that you can make sure to adapt it over time based on your needs. One of the key modalities for using tracker is through Android. So we have specific session around Android and what are the different considerations when you're using mobile devices for tracker versus using tracker through the web browser. Again, focusing much more on the implementation of Android than we are on the technology. But thinking through again things like how to manage resupply of devices and what kinds of performance considerations do you need to be prepared for? Thinking through how you're going to manage people's log-ons and how to replace devices over time. So many of the key implementation considerations. We'll provide some guidance as well around outlining the requirements for your tracker implementation. There are a number of kind of starting points for tracker. We'll go into some of that again today around, for example, the existing metadata packages from the WHO. But there always is the need for a specific localization or adaptation of tracker. And so we'd like to give you some frameworks for how to best go about identifying what your requirements are and getting those into your system. What are the kind of skills that you need, the kind of teams that you need, the activities that you would do? Within tracker and especially for all data that you might collect that could be considered sensitive data, personally identifiable data, there are a lot of security considerations. And again, thinking about this from the implementation perspective, who is the security team that would be responsible? What kind of activities must they take? What are the legislative or regulatory things that you should be looking into for your country to make sure that the way that you're using tracker is satisfying the requirements for your area? Thinking through what that means to be hosting personally identifiable information in a ministry environment, for example, and how to relate that to perhaps your other IT systems. So quite a lot to consider there and we will have several sessions devoted to thinking through those considerations. And then also having a framework for assessing your system. Again, over time, thinking through how you do kind of routine monitoring of your tracker system, how do you ensure that the training levels have been maintained, that the system is running long-term, that it's providing the kinds of data that you want? At what point might you make decisions about adapting your system or updating the system? So trying to help you understand what the possibilities are there and to plan for those. So given these kinds of objectives and the learning outcomes that we hope for, this Academy has been designed specifically to be looking towards project leads, development partners, those that are making decisions about where to allocate resources and what resources are needed to do a tracker implementation. The managers at the HMIS side who need to understand what it means to bring in an individual level data collection into perhaps their HMIS or aggregate architecture. IT managers who are responsible for managing and sustaining the systems over time, helping them understand their staffing requirements, what kind of team structure they might need, how they're going to handle IT support going forward, what kinds of kind of key challenges they should be aware of and be ready to have a response to. And of course, technical DHS2 leads, those of you that are already responsible for DHS2 in your country, whether you're using tracker already or you're about to begin to understanding what are the available resources put out by the university, what are the differences between the standard aggregate approach and the tracker approach when it comes to implementation. So these are the audience that this is specifically tailored for. If what you were doing is hoping to come and get insight into specific program rules or how to calculate a key indicator, that probably isn't what we're going to be covering very much of. You're going to get a lot more around planning, around resources, around risk mitigation, these kinds of activities. So we do have other tracker academies that would be more targeted for configuration and for more complex setups around tracker. So you can see that we've divided up the level one tracker academy into two different new courses. The tracker use course, covering data entry and data analysis. And the tracker configuration course, covering configuration of tracker programs. These have, the content has been developed and is in refinement at this point. We're planning to begin those courses in September of 2021. Given the current travel restrictions, we assume those will also be online courses and there will be announcements about those that you can share with the right people in your organizations who should have a better understanding of how to configure or what to do with data entry and data analysis. You can also consider always doing specific in country tracker configuration trainings. There are a number of groups offering support for training of your teams in country. We have our HIST network team, many of which you will hear from throughout these two weeks that are regionally based and would be available to provide specific in country trainings around tracker configuration. So again, you would probably have to consider as the person planning or managing for your tracker implementation that you do want to bring in some support in building up capacity in your internal team. So there's a lot more that I think we'll cover throughout the academy on these topics and give you a sense of where to obtain the resources. But we did want to make sure that we were all kind of on the same page about what is the content of this academy and what we'll be covering in the next two weeks. Hopefully all of you that are signed in and that are here are excited about this topic. We have quite a lot to share in many different sessions. There's never really enough time to finish everything but we hope to put you on the right path towards being able to have the resources and the knowledge that you need for proper tracker implementation. We also again, we'll have a specific learning tool that you will be using on your end which we'll introduce a bit more tomorrow. But this tool is a series of spreadsheets that you will be able to fill out on various topics based around your specific implementation. And so our hope is that by the end of these two weeks you actually will have a fairly detailed tracker implementation plan as the output of what we've been learning throughout these weeks and we'll give time in the academy to discuss your specifics, your plan and be able to share some of the things that your country is going to be going through with tracker. So that I think is my brief introduction of what this tracker academy is. We're gonna spend a few more minutes now with some of the administrative teams supporting this academy so that they can give you an idea of what the tools are and how we'll be using those tools. So I think at this point I will turn it over to Martin to walk us through some of those. Thank you, Mike. Can everyone hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Thank you. Right, so I will just go quickly through our Slack for everyone to see because not everyone are familiar with this communication tool we're going to use for this academy. So let me just share my screen. So what you're seeing right now is our Slack announcement channel. This is where the facilitators will be communicating directly to everyone, posting announcements. You will not be able to post it directly yourself but you can react to any comments. For instance, I'm gonna react now to Mike's comments by giving him a little wave. You could also write a comment, reply in thread if you have a question that's directly related to that announcement, like I'm doing right now. So the other channel you should be already have access to is the Introduce a Self channel. I'm just gonna select this right now. Here I would like everyone to introduce a self here for the benefit of us and also for everyone else attending. Here you can write your message, tell a little bit about yourself and why you're interested in tracker implementation. We also have, there we go, thank you, Sabun. Very nice, very nice. We have a Show Cases channel where you can show off some of your tracker implementation or programs from where you live. And of course, we have a Questions channel where you can write any kind of question regarding this academy. Last is the Project Planning Templates channel. This is where we're going to be posting about the exercises for this academy. Right, that is pretty much sums up our channels. You could also, if you can't find the channel, it's possible to find them here. Go to the channel browser and you can see all the channels that are available and join them. This is only if you're not already in the channel. Of course, you will not be able to join the Instructors channel for these reasons. Well, any questions regarding the Slack, feel free to pop them. Just post them directly in chat and I'll be able to answer them or if anything was unclear. Otherwise, that sums up the Slack introduction. Any questions? Good, good. I'll stop sharing now. Oh wait, let's just think. I'll stop sharing and let's get over to Ghassim who will be shoving off our new badges for the academy. Okay, so I'm going to be introducing today the academy badges that are new for all the participants in DHIs to Academy. Let's first talk about what the community practice is. The community practice is a place for you to join with a global space for you to interact with the Chaisu experts, with his groups, people who have implemented DHIsu from the beginning to almost the end and are still going and improving the DHIsu implementations. And it's a place for you to share experiences, to be part of the solution, be part of the solution in your country and this global good project. So the DHIsu project success is based on the community of the people who do DHIsu community practice is something that all DHIsu Academy participants should be engaged in. If you face difficulty while you're working on DHIsu, you can always go to the community practice and share and ask questions. What are these badges, the new set of badges in the community practice? For DHIsu, the active badges granted to the DHIsu Academy participant, when they're the kind of examples of when you could be posting questions and if I can stand on and so on. Of course, asking good questions shows that you're super active and anything that shows that you're paying attention and really part of the activities and the training or workshop in the DHIsu Academy event. And then there's the super helpful badge. The super helpful badge is granted for anyone who is helpful in the DHIsu Academy. So I won't give you examples but I'm just gonna ask you, how can you be helpful for others in the DHIsu Academy? And then there's the completion badges. There's the completion badges. So when you complete a course in the DHIsu Academy and you get a certificate for that, you also get a badge along with it in the community practice. There's the level one badge. So when you get the certificate for level one, the DHIsu Academy course, you also get this badge and there is the level two completion badge which you get when you'll finish this course. So please make sure that you are drawing that you have an account in the community practice so that you get this badge. And then there's the Academy participant badge. This badge is granted when you participate in a DHIsu Academy events such as webinars, workshops. So these are the side of badges and I would like to just show you the community practice page. This is the community DHIsu community practice page. Just go to community.dhsu.org and we'll send you the invitation link in the slide group. When you join, please make sure to go to connect and look at the introduce yourself, the different communities here and there's the introduce yourself topic. So try to check it out, check out the categories or support the different topics. And if you're still in the community practice, if you already have a user account, then that's great because you're gonna be receiving your badge. Let me show you the badges in this course. So these badges are in this course in the community practice or when you're engaging, sharing posts, liking posts, you get all these kind of badges. And over here, we have the DHIsu Academy of badges to practice, super helpful. DHIsu Academy participant, DHIsu Academy level one completion, DHIsu Academy level two completion. So when you go to, you have a profile, right? In the DHIsu Academy where you have your picture, your name and what you do in the, you kind of describe, you have a profile like Facebook and LinkedIn, but over here it's for the community you're gonna be interacting with. So it kind of should be related to DHIsu. This is the profile for user experience designer, DHIsu, Joe Cooper. And he received the badge, super helpful because these badges were designed by him. So yeah, as I said, make sure you have an account in the DHIsu community and click on the link, join. So that when you're, while you're interacting in this academy, you have the super active, super helpful, be helpful, be super active. And when you complete the level two discourse and you get a certificate, you're also gonna get badge in the community practice. We'll come and if you have any questions, you can always go to community practice, ask your questions, as well as in the Slack group and for this course. So I'm gonna stop sharing. There's the link, Alice shared it with you, so sorry. Okay, so the community practice is the online global space for you to join and connect with the DHIsu experts with the HES groups around the world who have implemented the DHIsu instances from beginning to almost end and they're still doing implementation is unimproving. It's part of you to be part of the success of the DHIsu project because the DHIsu is really all about the community that DHIsu are the people who are working around the world, who supporting each other and sharing experiences. So the community practice is an online web-based platform where you can join and create a profile, introduce yourself, as well as get to know others, listen from, hear about their experiences, share your experiences, as well as ask questions for support. It's fairly easy to go. You can click on the link, Alice send you in the Zoom chats. And join. You can always go to the community practice and ask questions. And the other point, maybe you missed, is that DHIsu Academy participants are encouraged to be part of the community practice because that's the place where you will develop your educational and professional path by sharing with other students and experts and people who are part of the DHIsu implementations and developments. I hope this is clear. Thank you so much, Gassim. Thank you for this nice introduction. So basically, as Gassim said, one of the key points is that we would like to encourage all of you who do not have yet an account on the community of practice to create your account there. You know, at the end of this academy, you will be receiving certificates of participation along with these certificates of participation. You will also receive a badge of participation on your COP profile. So this is why we would like to give at least one minute to all of you who do not have yet an account on the COP to click on the link that I shared in the chat so that you can create your account. It's very quick. It takes like 15 seconds. So yeah, you have one minute to click on this link and create your account. Once you're done, you can just let us know with a thumbs up. Thank you so much. Let's wait a few seconds. And while some of you are doing this, just to highlight the fact that the two over badges that you can get while participating in this academy, meaning the super helpful badge and the super active badge will be allocated to those who are actively are very active on the Academy Slack. So it's also important to join the Academy Slack. I think some of you are not on the Academy Slack yet. So I shared a link to join the Academy Slack. Now, Alice, I'm old. Why do I want a badge? Sorry. I'm old. Why do I want an electronic badge? What's the benefit of having a badge? The benefit of having a badge is basically to... It's a kind of reward because you have your certificates. But when you have your badge, the community can see that you are an active participant within the DHS2 community. So it's a kind of nice and fun way to also reward our community members and the most active ones. Like for instance, in some academies, we can see that we have some participants who are really eager to learn, asking questions and very relevant and important questions or even sharing tips with other members of the community. So we thought that it would be a kind of good way to recognize this contribution as well. So this is why you would like to have a badge, Kim. I'm excited to be part of the DHS2 community and show my support with active participation. Thank you, Kim.