Silvia Alvinia of OUCRU Indonesia has won the Best Innovation title for her poster presentation on the SPHERES project at the Leimena Conference 2026, a national primary health care scientific meeting held on 27–29 July in Jakarta.
The award was presented at the conference’s closing ceremony by Director General of Primary Care and Community Health of the Ministry of Health, Endang Sumiwi, as part of the Leimena Award, which recognises the strongest research and practice submissions from among several hundred abstracts reviewed by the conference’s scientific committee.
The SPHERES team ran a booth in the conference’s exhibition area over the three days, and six of its members presented abstracts. Silvia’s winning entry, “Expanding SATUSEHAT to Support Cross-Sector Interoperability in Primary Health Care,” was presented as a poster.
Silvia’s poster set out how SPHERES seamlessly connects health records in Purbalingga and West Lombok. It does this through what is known as a “federated ecosystem”: each district keeps control over its own records, but a shared standardised format lets facilities and districts exchange information with each other.
So far, SPHERES has integrated 42 community health clinics and 12 hospitals in both districts, generating more than 800 million standardised health records. This gives health workers a more complete picture of individual patients’ care, and gives district health offices the real-time evidence they need to spot broader trends and shape public health policy.
“This award is a recognition for what the SPHERES team and partners have been trying to do in Purbalingga and West Lombok,” Silvia said. “That is, building an interoperable system that is genuinely useful for the health workers and district officials who rely on it every day, not just a technical exercise on paper.”
Much of Indonesia’s health data is still scattered across separate systems, making it difficult to build a complete picture of a patient’s care. The government has been working to close this gap through SATUSEHAT, a national platform for exchanging health records built on an international data standard called FHIR. In practice, however, large amounts of clinical, social and cross-sector data still sit outside SATUSEHAT, particularly at the district and facility level. This is the gap SPHERES was designed to fill, by standardising all data in Puskesmas and hospitals, so that local systems can connect with each other and, ultimately, with SATUSEHAT itself.
SPHERES (Scalable Public Health Empowerment, Research, and Education Sites) is a Gates Foundation-funded project that promotes data for action, run by OUCRU Indonesia in collaboration with the district governments of Purbalingga and West Lombok and the Ministry of Health. Following a high-level visit in March 2026, Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin asked for the project to be scaled up to all 514 districts and cities in Indonesia over the next three years.
Leimena Conference 2026 was organised by the Ministry of Health through the Primary Health Care (PHC) Consortium, together with the National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) and the Australian Government. The event is named in honour of Johannes Leimena, the former health minister regarded as the father of Indonesia’s community health center system called ‘Puskesmas’. The conference brought together health workers, researchers and policymakers from across Indonesia under the theme “Primary Health Care Integration: Strengthening Puskesmas, Serving the Community”, focused on Indonesia’s ongoing rollout of Integrated Primary Health Care Services.
Several other members of the SPHERES team also presented at Leimena Conference 2026:
- Dilla Rosa looked at whether offering incentives could encourage more pregnant women to attend antenatal check-ups.
- Imam Bagus Faisal shared practical ways to help staff at health facilities make more decisions based on data.
- Ainun Permata Shanie presented a walk-in booth in West Lombok that screens people for common non-communicable diseases, such as diabetes and high blood pressure, and treats them on the spot.
- Devvy Herawati Silayuningsih presented a dashboard tool that lets health staff dig into the data behind it, to monitor and improve the quality of clinical care.
- Jusi Febrianto presented on how SPHERES delivers a positive return on investment for integrated primary health care.