dhis2-users team mailing list archive

[Knut Staring <knutst@xxxxxxxxx>]

Not sure how helpful this is in your case, but I would think you could
achieve this using the Web API in an HTML report, where you will be able to
send in parameters.

Knut


On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 2:47 PM, Jim Grace <jimgrace@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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