Assessing Digital Maturity and Readiness for SRS Design and Integration
Understanding existing digital data systems is an essential component of planning an effective sample registration system (SRS). In August 2025 the VIVA project hosted a webinar that explained the concept of digital maturity and presented a draft checklist that country teams can use to assess readiness for SRS system integration. This is part of a monthly webinar series being conducted in 2025 for recipients of planning grants to develop SRS systems in African countries; other webinars are available on VIVA’s YouTube channel.
Matt Boyas from MITRE led the presentation, and Kingsley Arhin-Wiredu from the Centers for Disease Control shared experiences from Zambia and other projects.
“Digital maturity is about how advanced and effective a system is,” Mr. Arhin-Wiredu said. “It looks at different aspects, such as how well the system works, how it performs, and how well it meets the needs of its users.”
The checklist was in draft at the time of the webinar and is expected to be finalized in September 2025. It includes a set of questions and a table listing tools and frameworks that could be used to answer the questions.
To access the checklist and slide decks from the presentation,
click on “Get the Tools” in the upper righthand corned of this page
The checklist includes seven sections which correspond to World Health Organization’s health systems building blocks:
Leadership and governance
Strategy and investment
Services and applications
Standards and interoperability
Infrastructure
Legislation, policy and compliance
Workforce
“A key questions to consider: Do existing systems have the features and functionalities for the country's ideal SRS system?” Mr. Arhin-Wiredu said. “Establishing SRS-specific digital systems must also align with features and functionalities that make them easy to integrate or interoperate with other systems. Policies should allow easy data sharing with users of the SRS, etc.”
The webinar discussion also included the following topics:
How to leverage existing systems and to avoid duplicating effort.
Discussion around the system in Zambia, which had existing tools that could be modified to develop a SRS system; however, it still required software engineers configuring the system to work with the SRS.
Challenges related to changing existing government systems. In many settings, creating a new system is easier than modifying an existing system. Later, the two systems could be integrated.
“Systems” include multiple elements: data collection, processing, interpretation and sharing. Each can require different technologies and software. For example, countries may have experience with specific software (such as ODK for data collection); this can be taken this into account when planning systems.
How to make the SRS data available for other systems and people who are already using those systems.
How to think about the needs for launching the system versus the longterm goals for system functionality.
Related Resource:
World Bank - Digital Health Maturity Assessments and Toolkits
