dhis2-devs team mailing list archive

[Calle Hedberg <calle.hedberg@xxxxxxxxx>]

Kristof,

Support for multiple hierarchies is one of the main features of DHIS 1.x
(the MS Office based version) that the core team decided NOT to include
with DHIS2, presumably because non of the early adopters of DHIS2 required
that. SA used up to three different hierarchies for many years during
transition periods, although gradually the interest in the "older"
hierarchies was reduced and we changed over to using "backups" to cater for
the remaining long term trend analysis needs (ref 1 below).

There are some dhis2 strategies you can use to achieve similar results,
though:

1.
For historical comparisons across significant boundary change events, you
can use "backup" copies of the same data existing on your servers under
different names. Whether such comparisons will enable to you determine if a
positive or negative health indicator change is primarily due to the
restructuring or something else - well, that will depend a lot on how
radical the re-structuring is and of course what kind of re-structuring and
increased resources are used on the ground. Example:
- in a very corrupt country, where the bulk of health funding are stolen by
politicians and bureaucrats, a radical re-structuring eliminating the most
corrupt groups might yield significant and verifiable results.
- for your typical admin boundary changes for political reasons, like when
a president creates more and more districts as part of a jobs for votes
programme, I think you will find it a lot more difficult to prove that it
results in poorer service delivery.
- the same will be the case for boundary changes that relates to
longer-term changes in populations and habitats. E.g. it is unlikely that
suburb A and suburb B, having grown 50% over 10 years and is now split into
suburb C and D and E, will provide you will enough data that you can
attribute changes in health status of the split to the split itself.

2.
For multiple hierarchies currently in use, you can run concurrent instances
with different hierarchies but where the lower level data is kept in synch
using automated tools (e.g. HISP-SA and HISP-India are developing Apps for
meta-data synch and data synch).

3.
Depending on the level of difference, you can also use OrgUnit attributes
combined with some sql views and custom reporting to deal with partially
different hierarchies.

4.
Again depending on the type of data and hierarchies involved, you can
possibly "merge" the hierarchies into a new hierarchy with more detailed,
composite orgunits at the lowest level. This method is actually a generic
solution to many seemingly incompatible classification systems - you break
the different classification systems down into more uniform base components
for which you can attach the relevant data. Moving from routinely collected
aggregated data to Tracker data, or to an Electronic Medical Record system,
is a variant of this principle. The further your data collection moves
towards the real world, the easier it becomes to aggregate and analyse the
data from multiple perspectives (including organisational perspectives).

My 2c worth

Regards
Calle

On 3 June 2016 at 00:19, Kristof Bostoen <kristof@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

> Dear Developers,
>
> We just posted our desire to add multiple hierarchies to DHIS2 in
> Launchpad.
> https://blueprints.launchpad.net/dhis2/+spec/multiple-hierarchies
>
> We think we need this to be able to analyse the data according to
> significantly different hierarchical systems, in our case a
> geo-administrative one and one based water basins which do always follow
> administrative lines.
>
> With multiple hierarchies we also want to be able to keep historical
> (past) hierarchies when administrative boundaries change so we can see if
> changes to results is due to restructuring our based on real changes.
>
> If you identified the same problem, have already found a solution to this
> problem or have implementation advice we would very much appreciate.
>
> Kind regards
> Kristof
>
>
>
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