dhis2-users team mailing list archive

["Wilson,Randy" <rwilson@xxxxxxx>]

Hi Jim,

This is very similar to the data element that many countries use for family planning users at the end of the month and you are right it is a bit of a pain that DHIS-2 doesn’t support this sort of analysis right out of the box.  We have health facilities report this cumulative indicator at the end of each month as a data element (family planning users at end of previous month + new users – dropouts).  For simple analysis, we calculate indicators based on data from a specific month (don’t ask for Annual or Quarterly data, for example, or you will get nearly 12 or 3 time the expected numbers.  We can use this nicely in maps for example.  You can also use the data visualizer and display the data from several fixed periods (dec 2010, dec 2011, dec 2012 for example).

For more sophisticated analyses, you can use quite complex SQL queries as the basis for iReports and iReports does have a nice interface for including user defined parameters (such as Month and Year), but I have not had much luck including those reports within the DHIS-2 reports module. It seems to only recognize a couple of dhis-2 specific parameters that can be specified at run-time within DHIS-2 (organisationunit, period, etc…).  If you include a user-defined parameter the report runs fine in the iReport report viewer, but errors out in DHIS-2.

I like Jason’s suggestion of running some SQL code – through a scheduled chron job, for example – and then inserting the data into the aggregated indicator values table, but you’ll need to run the chron job after the aggregatedindicatorvalues tables gets refreshed.  You could, for example, create a query that prompts for a month that you would like the HIV cumulative indicator calculated, then you could use that month/year and calculate month/year-1 to retrieve the previous period’s data and combine it with the selected months data through a couple of queries.

Jason helped us create a number of materialized views – temporary tables that are stored in the same database and refreshed nightly – that our users find easier to use for Excel pivot tables than MyDatamart, because they only include data elements in specific dataelement/indicator groups.  The main issue with that approach is that those new tables are not visible to any of the DHIS-2 analysis tools – or even the API.  They need to be downloaded through a separate web-page you create or linked to DHIS-2 through the backend Postgres ODBC connection that only works for us when we are in the same building as the network (security settings and internet connection speeds make remote ODBC links impractical in Rwanda).

Randy



From: Dhis2-users [mailto:dhis2-users-bounces+rwilson=msh.org@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Knut Staring
Sent: Thursday, May 16, 2013 8:45 AM
To: Jim Grace
Cc: dhis2-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [Dhis2-users] Cumulative numbers in DHIS2

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<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto: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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--
Knut Staring
Dept. of Informatics, University of Oslo
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http://dhis2.org