dhis2-devs team mailing list archive

[Knut Staring <knutst@xxxxxxxxx>]

Here in India, the activities of  Subcenters differ quite a bit in the
particular services they offer. Therefore, since all use a standard format,
there will almost always be a number of fields that are not applicable.
Because of this, they maintain that 0 is signficant, because it means "Have
the service, but no cases this month", whereas a blank field means "Don't
have the service" in other words N/A.

Sometimes it can even mean something in-between, like "We normally
distribute Iron tablets, but sometimes we don't have them (blank), and
sometimes we have them but there is no demand (0)". In my view the latter
semantics is quite complicated, and hard to get consistent, but I'm being
told the health workers handle it well. Thus, a typical report can consist
of 50 positive integers, 7 blanks and 20 zeros.

Since data entry on the mobile is quite cumbersome and zeros also tend to
fill up the database, I would have preferred zeros to be non-significant
and just go with blanks. But then we would lose the above distinction.

Knut


-- 
Knut Staring
Dept. of Informatics, University of Oslo
+4791880522
http://dhis2.org