DHIS2, Solstice, or both? A practical decision guide

Water utility staff and the mapping team outside the Bié water and sanitation company office in Angola

DHIS2 and Solstice do different jobs, and many ministries need both. DHIS2 is built for national health reporting. Solstice and mWater are built for the work on the ground: mapped facilities and infrastructure, repeat inspections, and follow-up until problems are fixed. This guide helps you decide which one to extend, and when to connect them.

Start with the job to be done

What you need	Where to start
National health indicators and routine reporting	DHIS2
Individual patient or program records with an existing DHIS2 package	DHIS2 Tracker
Maps and records of water, sanitation, facilities, and infrastructure	mWater
Assignments, follow-up across sectors, and workflows	Solstice
National DHIS2 plus detailed local or environmental work	Connect them, with each system in charge of its own data
Clinical care, laboratories, pharmacy, or supply chains	A system built for that purpose

When to extend DHIS2

The ministry already has a strong DHIS2 team, hosting, and support.
The new need fits the existing facilities, reporting periods, and indicators.
Users already work in DHIS2, and a second system would add little.
The country's DHIS2 team can maintain the change.

When Solstice or mWater is the stronger choice

You need lasting records of water points, sanitation, facilities, or equipment, each with its own history.
Field teams work offline and return to the same sites again and again.
The work involves health, water, local government, and partner organizations together.
Fixing problems matters as much as reporting them: someone must be assigned, act, and show it was done.
You want maps, surveys, indicators, dashboards, and workflows in one place that your own staff can change.
You need environmental data, such as rainfall, flood risk, or population, next to each site.

When to connect them

Connect the systems when each one has its own lasting job, and the data you exchange supports a real decision. A scheduled exchange of totals is often safer and cheaper than syncing every record live. For a yearly plan, an export may be enough. Rapid alerts need an automatic exchange that someone monitors.

Before you pay for an integration, agree which system is the source of each item, how IDs match, how often data moves, and who fixes errors. Budget for keeping it working when either system changes.

Questions to ask before you choose

Which decisions will the system improve, and who makes them?
Does a national system already do this job?
Is the data totals, individual records, environmental readings, or records of infrastructure?
What must happen after a problem is found?
Who owns each dataset, and who can correct it?
What personal data is truly needed?
Can the ministry run the system with its own staff and budget?
Can all data be exported if plans change?
How will you measure success, beyond the number of forms or trained users?

Test with a real workflow

Do not choose from a generic demo. Test two or three of your own workflows on real phones, real connectivity, and your languages. Go through the whole cycle: collect data offline, sync, review, correct, assign, fix, check, report, and export.

Compare the full cost

License fees are only part of the cost. Count setup, hosting, integration, phones, data plans, training, support, and staff time for at least five years. Free software still needs people to run it.

Solstice and mWater charge no license or per-user fees. Ministries can run them with their own staff, and each organization can export its data through the API at any time.

Our recommendation

Keep DHIS2 as the national health reporting system where a country has invested in it. Add Solstice and mWater where the work depends on local evidence, infrastructure, environmental conditions, or follow-up until a problem is fixed. Connect them through a small, well-defined exchange, and keep the system in the hands of the institutions that run it. Zimbabwe's Ministry of Health and Child Care shows the pattern: DHIS2 remains its health reporting system, while its own staff run the national WASH information system on mWater. Read how it works.

Sources and further reading

See the official DHIS2 pages on health intelligence, community health, and platform features; Solstice Institute and the mWater platform overview; and the other guides in this series.

Planning a health, WASH, or environmental information system? Contact info@solstice.world and we will help you plan it.