Data quality toolkit for HIV testing services and strengthening data systems
Implementation guidance and tools to help countries, programmes, and facilities assess, monitor, and improve the quality of HIV testing services data and strengthen data systems through a streamlined, step-by-step, interactive approach.
WHO's 2022 Consolidated guidelines on person-centred HIV strategic information recommend integrating routine data quality assessments into long-term data quality improvement strategies to strengthen data quality, promote systematic data use, and support evidence-based decision-making for improved service delivery and HIV outcomes.
This WHO HTS Data Quality Assessment Toolkit supports countries and programmes to implement this recommendation by providing a focused approach to assessing, monitoring, and improving the quality of HIV testing services (HTS) data. It offers practical, step by step guidance and standardised tools to verify priority HTS indicators, address common data quality challenges, and strengthen HTS data systems through targeted remedial actions, ensuring that HTS data are reliable, and used for programme decision making and continuous quality improvement.
Background
HTS data are essential for effective HIV programmes. Reliable, timely, and complete data enable countries to track progress along the HIV care cascade, identify gaps in testing and linkage to prevention and treatment services, support procurement and resource planning, and ensure accountability to stakeholders.
As countries move closer to achieving the 95–95–95 targets (95% of all people living with HIV know their HIV status; 95% of people who know their status are receiving HIV treatment and 95% of all of people on treatment are virally suppressed), access to accurate and granular HTS data is increasingly critical to identify populations and geographic areas that are being left behind and to guide targeted, equitable interventions.
In addition to indicator-level data quality assessment tools, WHO has developed a surveillance checklist as a standardized approach to assess the overall performance of national HIV surveillance systems. This checklist enables a nationally representative assessment of whether routine HIV data systems capture core data elements and meet defined standards for data quality, completeness, consistency and system coverage. It examines both the structure and outputs of surveillance systems across key domains including HIV case reporting, treatment outcomes, prevention monitoring and HIV testing, and identifies strengths, gaps and priority actions for system strengthening. Used alongside HTS data quality assessments, this broader system-level approach supports countries in determining whether routine data are of sufficient quality to generate reliable national estimates of HIV incidence, prevalence and mortality, and to guide targeted efforts to identify and address gaps in HIV surveillance across the HIV cascade. Read more from the 2026 Consolidated guidance for strengthening national routine surveillance system: updated HIV case definitions, advanced HIV disease indicators and surveillance checklist.
Objectives
The objectives of this toolkit are:
- to develop new standardised tools and adapt existing tools and approaches for data quality assessment and routine data quality monitoring for HTS;
- to identify priority HTS data quality challenges and gaps and support the development and implementation of key remedial actions and strengthen data systems;
- to enable rapid assessment and verification of key HTS indicators to improve progress tracking and identification of programmatic gaps; and
- to strengthen the use of testing data to improve service delivery and linkage to care and programme monitoring.
Scope
This toolkit takes a stepwise approach, initially focusing on facility-based HIV testing data, which account for a significant proportion of reported testing and present specific reporting challenges such as incomplete reporting, delays, and double counting. While future versions will address additional testing modalities, the tools presented here can be applied beyond facility settings.
The toolkit prioritises assessment of 2 key WHO recommended indicators: people testing positive for HIV (HTS.3) and HTS test volume and positivity (HTS.2), while allowing countries to adapt assessments to their specific context and data needs.
Process of development
This toolkit was developed through a collaborative effort led by the Global HIV Data Quality Technical Working Group convened by WHO, involving a desk review of existing HTS data quality assessment tools and approaches and a technical scoping consultation. Experts from WHO, UNAIDS, the Global Fund and other key partners, and national HIV programmes participated in the scoping consultation to identify priority HTS data quality issues and provide input on the module's scope. The consultation included a prioritisation exercise of HTS indicators and data quality issues to be addressed by this toolkit.
Target audience
This toolkit is designed to support the needs of HIV programme managers, facility staff, implementing partners, funders and other stakeholders involved in the collection, analysis, and use of HTS data to improve data quality and utilisation. It can be used by national and sub national health authorities, civil society, private sector providers, researchers, and evaluators to support data quality improvement, performance monitoring, and evidence based HIV programme decision making.