dhis2-users team mailing list archive

[Jim Grace <jimgrace@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Jason,

Thanks. I agree it's best not to collect a cumulative amount as a data element when it could be derived. You've given me some ideas how to pull it out -- for instance I see I can write a Jasper report based on a query. Although otherwise I was thinking we could pull all the data we need through Report Tables -- which would be easier for FACES to maintain after I leave. As a possible future DHIS enhancement, I think some way of getting this functionality in a Report Table would be preferable, whether as a report table feature, or as a way of defining a cumulative indicator (even better in my opinion, because of the many ways that indicators can be used.) I realize it would be performance expensive to compute such an indicator. But if it's what you need, you have to pay this price one way or another.

At the moment I'm writing some code to use the Web API to pull out the FACES data and put it into the MS Access reporting tool. Kenya is set to convert from this tool to DHIS, but meanwhile we have to report through it. So it sounds like for each site/month I will have to pull this data element for all previous months and sum it in my tool. Or could I somehow get this through a SQL view? I don't see any way of using parameters in a SQL view. (Am I missing something?) So would I have to write a SQL view to generate the cumulatives for all possible reporting months for all FACES sites? That sounds awkward. Maybe pulling all prior months through the API is the lesser evil, even though the Internet connection is somewhat slow here in Kenya.

Cheers,
Jim

On May 16, 2013, at 2:26 PM, Jason Pickering <jason.p.pickering@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 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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