Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Master Facility List

I don't love Wednesdays, because I have 4+ hours of scheduled calls. There's nothing wrong with any individual call, it's when you put them together...

Anyway, after 6 hours on the phone today, I figured I'd look into a smaller task, namely writing some code to upload the master Kenya Health Facilities List into OpenMRS so I could include it in our distro as a Metadata Sharing package.

So I opened the spreadsheet up for the first time and really looked at it. It's amazing to see that all this data is codified at all. But for some reason (lack of imagination I guess) I wasn't expecting to find 8110 facilities. So, pretty awesome. But I guess I'll need some guidance about what fraction of the facility list we actually include in the database...

12 comments:

  1. Believe it or not, Darius... I'm working with MoHs in both Rwanda and Kenya to develop a standard "facility registry" software that will serve up facility information as part of the enterprise architecture.

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  2. More info about the specific implementation in Rwanda is here: http://jira.jembi.org/wiki/display/RHEAPILOT/Health+Facility+Registry

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  3. BTW, you'll probably only want to include type: medical clinic... that shrinks your n considerably.

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  4. That gets it down to 2268. But it leaves off the ~1000 "Health Centers".

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  5. Paul, just out of curiosity, why include only the medical clinics?

    Darius, the project I am working for, AfyaInfo is currently charged with supporting the MOH with maintenance of the MFL and I know there are some enhancement plans in place and some that have already been implemented. I will get update details about those this coming week and share here.

    Hey Paul, facility registry (FRED project) discussions came up at a mHealth Summit I attended in Capetown last week and I will follow up on this discussion with you separately since we had already started discussing this when you were in Kenya.

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  6. We could use this sort of upload functionality in the RHEA project. Perhaps a generic csv uploader where columns can be mapped to fields would be useful.

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  7. Sounds good, Steven... I don't know what the right classification in the MFL is, but it seemed clear from cursory review of the data that all of the listed sites aren't clinics where OpenMRS would be installed (for example, dispensaries)....

    I thought there were ~2400 eligible sites for OpenMRS implementation.

    Steven... additionally, please do ping me on FRED. I spoke with Martin and Tom on this recently, and it might be good to get you up to speed.

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    1. Paul:

      The classification of health facilities in the MFL is not 100% accurate based on inefficient underlying processes - and therefore not everything called a "clinic" is trully a clinic (I'm not even sure what the definitions of those classifications are or where they are). Part of the process we are undertaking as a project is to have a regulatory element in the MFL so that as whoever regulates registration of new health facilities, inspection of existing ones, etc provides that validation info to provide the required content quality required of the MFL. That hasn't happened yet. So we could use that general "facility type" classification for now to estimate/plan for sites eligible for OpenMRS implementation, but with caution.

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  8. We have a JSON Api in the RHEA Master facility registry, maybe that is easier than re-implementing CSV parsing (dealing with escapes etc) for http requests?
    https://bitbucket.org/instedd/resource_map/wiki/REST_API

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    1. Well, the registry in Kenya is currently distributes *as* an Excel spreadsheet, so that's going to need to get parsed anyway. :-)

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  9. We're hoping to have the spreadsheet import module for OpenMRS done in the next 2 weeks

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    1. Joaquin, is this spreadsheet import module general enough to do things like import a facility registry and create Locations?

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