Strengthening paper health register systems: strategies from case studies in Ethiopia, Ghana, South Africa and Uganda.

Health information systems (HIS) include a spectrum of data collection tools that support clinical decision–making; facilitate tracking of patients, drug stock, and disease trends; and inform policymaking [1]. As intermediaries between individual patient records and population–level data, health registers occupy a unique space in HIS. Health registers are “a collection of records containing data about aspects of the health of individual persons” [2].