dhis2-users team mailing list archive

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

Hi Jim,
I have seen this exact same data element being collected USAID/PEPFAR
supported organisations in Nigeria, Different organisations there, follow
different approaches, either of collecting it in the way which you mention,
or recording the cumulative figure each month. In the context of DHIS2, the
recording of cumulative totals is not really a great idea, because there is
not a "LATEST" aggregation operator, whereby the system simply would take
the latest available cumulative figure as the current one.

With that in mind, it is number better to simply record the number of new
entrants each month. Once you have this, you can easily create a custom
report to accumulate the data from inception, use an SQL query to aggregate
it directly, or pull it out into other analytical tools such as R/Stata. I
think if you need something for end-users, you would need to develop a
custom report to achieve this, whereby data would be aggregated from
inception of reporting, up until the "End date" chosen by the user.

Best regards,
Jason




On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 10:58 AM, Jim Grace <jimgrace@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> My PEPFAR partner organization FACES in Kenya is configuring our own DHIS2
> instance to collect data among the clinics we support. One of the standard
> government variables we collect and report each month is "ever enrolled in
> [HIV/AIDS] care". This means the cumulative number enrolled since the start
> of the service at each facility, which is often several years ago. It
> equals the sum of all the "enrolled this month" numbers going back through
> time. For example if "ever enrolled" is 4000 in January 2013, and "enrolled
> this month" is 100 in February 2013, then "ever enrolled" must be 4100 in
> February.
>
> I am not (yet) seeing a good way to compute this in DHIS, so I'm asking
> advice. When we first started collecting this data from clinics in our
> current system of spreadsheets, we asked each clinic to compute the
> cumulative total and enter it for each month. We had a lot of errors this
> way, and we realized that it would be better calculating this in our tool
> instead of asking the data clerks to do this. So in our spreadsheets we
> just compute it by taking the previous month's "ever enrolled" and adding
> this month's "enrolled this month". Our records don't always go back to the
> start of care at each clinic, so we usually have an initial, hand-entered
> "ever enrolled" to get things started on the month before we enter real
> data for that clinic.
>
> Now we are trying to convert our system of spreadsheets to DHIS, and I
> don't see a good way to do this. I've tried creating a Report Table with
> "Include cumulative" checked, but it only gives me cumulative numbers
> within the range of report months. What we really need is to get the
> numbers for one or more sites, for one or more months, and to have "ever
> enrolled" as one of the numbers that is reported per site, per month. The
> best options I can think of are:
>
> 1. Ask each site to compute this number each month and enter it as a data
> element.
>
> 2. Export the data from DHIS into our own software and have our software
> compute this number.
>
> Are there any better options?
>
> Cheers,
> Jim
>
>
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