dhis2-devs team mailing list archive

[Jason Pickering <jason.p.pickering@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Johan,
They are definetely real, at least. It does not mean they are
elsewhere. But the examples I just provided have come from data review
and analysis workshops conducted in the field here, which are a
primary means of district health officers being able to conduct
planning and performance review. They need to know what the total
number of outpatient attendances are, regardless of disease, so they
can plan staffing levels. They need to know prevalence of vector borne
diseases to plan spraying campaigns and bed-net campaigns. I did not
come up with these examples trivially, but have heard this time and
time again from the DHIOs here.

But I do not agree with you about your last point. Looking at
prevalence of communicable versus non-communicable disease incidence
is important, at least this is what people at WHO have told me.
Perhaps it is not, but I see no reason to doubt. I agree, there are
infinite possibilities, and that is the point of a PivotTable. The
system should enable the analysis in such as way as makes sense to the
people using the data.

I am not trying to be academic at all , but am rather trying to
distill into code, functionality and specifications what the
requirements from this country are. Perhaps they are not applicable
elsewhere, in which case, we need to decide whether it is something
general that should be implemented in the main branch, or specific and
should be implemented here only.

Regards,
Jason



On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 2:12 PM,  <johansa@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> A general comment to this:
>
> Are the scenarios provided in this thread really a requested
> functionality? I can see that it's possible to come up with an infinite
> number of possible ways to look at data, but to look at "all communicable
> diseases", is something you don't do that often, I believe. Unless of
> course, you want some useless data. The few times you want it, you can
> combine the DE groups "vector-borne", "sexually transmitted" etc.. in
> pivots or with SQL.
>
> The design principle should be needs-focused, not possible-focused, though
> I sense there are great discussions to be had regarding database design
> and good coding etc. But be careful about creating a demand that does not
> exist.
>
>>> I don't think we can provide district health officers
>>>
>>> "How many cases of OPD, IP and Deaths of Malaria have their been, with
>>> possible slices of those dimensions (by age, comparing clinical and
>>> confirmed etc)." while our dataentry screen have just a single entry
>>> field
>>> for "OPD 1st Attendance Clinical Case of Malaria Under 1"
>>
>> Yes, we cannot, at least not reverting to dodgy SQL and naming
>> conventions to unravel the "dimensions" that are hiding inside of
>> names. Granted, the cateogry combos can help, but they do not go far
>> enough. But we do need to figure out how we can do this.
>>
>> I am attaching a few files, My apologies for this, but they are quite
>> small. I have attached a sample data entry form, which is used at the
>> facility level. You can see, this mirrors many of my examples
>> throughout this thread.
>>
>> I have also included in this file, a PivotTable, that I created to
>> answer the question above. It is not complete, but it does seperate
>> OPD. IP and deaths into seperate columns. I have scrambled the data
>> with random values, but have left values that were "blank" from the
>> data entry ,but showed up in the query.
>>
>> Now, I should be able to do this table by using category combos I
>> guess pretty easy. What I cannot do is then to aggregate by dimensions
>> that are not present in the category combos themselves, at least, but
>> I guess this is the functionality that Ola describes.
>>
>> Hope these two examples may help to make this a bit more concrete.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Jason
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