A six-week course for communities at the earliest stages of HIFIS 4 pre-implementation. Covers planning and needs assessment, IT & legal requirements, consent and the basics of data collection.

About Term 1

Term 1 of the HIFIS 4 Implementation Masterclass is all about getting your ducks in a row before you even start thinking about configuring HIFIS.

Arguably, this phase of the project is the most important phase because you're really looking at the project as a whole and trying to understand what your needs are and what problems you're trying to solve by adopting HIFIS. In other words, you're doing a needs assessment and getting the right people in the room. Some communities skip some of important planning steps and want to jump right in to design and development, but then have problems later when they don't know who is in charge of making decisions, or don't have legal sign-off by the time they want to launch their new software.

If you're familiar with the concept of the System Development Life Cycle, we're going to be covering the first two phases - Planning & Analysis - in this course. If you're not familiar with the concept, take a look at the diagram above. At a really high level, it shows you what your path will be to HIFIS 4 implementation.

Target Audience

At the start of this course, we assume that you:

• Have high-level approval to proceed with HIFIS 4 implementation. By this, we mean the executive decision has been made that as a community, it’s happening.
• Have resources assigned to the project. In other words, there are staff like you whose job includes implementing HIFIS. If there haven’t been resources assigned to the project (i.e. it’s just you and you’re doing it part time on the edge of your desk), you’ll probably have a hard time making the project happen. Be sure to get internal buy-in before you start this course!
• Have begun talking to some of your Partner Agencies (i.e. the shelters and other providers in your community) but don’t necessarily have solid commitments from anyone about using HIFIS
• Do not have a server set up to host HIFIS (if you do, you’re ahead of the game)
• Do not have your legal agreements in place (i.e. data sharing agreements and consent) (again, if you do, that’s a bonus)
• Are at least 6 months from your planned launch date
• Have a general idea what HIFIS 4 is!

Learning Objectives

By the end of this course, you will:

• Have identified your core HIFIS 4 Implementation project team
• Have identified your partner agencies who will act as stakeholders in this project
• Have an avenue to get meaningful feedback from your partner agencies
• Have begun to get your legal documents in order, including data sharing agreements and consent forms
• Understand how to begin setting up your service providers and clusters
• Understand how client files are accessed within HIFIS 4<
• Decide on what personal information you’ll be collecting in your community