Preparation of Health Information Management System
Madhya Pradesh is a populous State with a large number of villages. Access to health facilities is very poor and the government’s infrastructure is also limited and does not match the requirement any way. The health services also are not effective because of large geographic dimensions, poor connectivity and im-proportionate deployment of manpower and resources. The Department of Family Welfare and Public Health, Government of M. P, manages these services through a large infrastructure spread over across the State. It runs several family welfare programmes involving heavy funds and large resources. But, it is unable to exercise effective control over the activities as it lacks the exact information about its own infrastructure and activities. Unfortunately, neither such information is readily available nor there is any defined mechanism to maintain such vast information about the entire machinery.
DANIDA, the Danish International Development Agency has been supporting Department of Health on resource development, training, family welfare (especially women and child) activities etc. It completed its tenure of stay in Madhya Pradesh in December 2004. DANIDA and Health Department’s higher authorities felt the strong need of compilation of up-to-date information from the field and realized this as the basic necessity to manage the huge infrastructure and the services associated. It was decided to develop a multifaceted database for the entire State covering information on health infrastructure, services, family programmes and the indicators of its impact. The information items to include were chosen as detailed information of all types of health service providers (individuals like qualified, nonqualified and traditional practitioners and government and private institutions) information on women such as pregnancy registration, ANCs, delivery, etc., information on children like births, birth rates, immunization etc.
	The challenge was to cover the entire state, all its villages and towns and it called for a very large primary survey for getting the information from the very source in the field. NCHSE was invited to do the job which included carrying out the entire survey, computerization of the information, linking it to village maps and finally formulate a Geographic Information System on Health. Since the DANIDA had a schedule of closing its operations in December 2004 and whereas the work was assigned only in the month of April 2004, there was extreme time pressure to accomplish the whole task without any time delays. The mandate was to cover 48 districts – nearly 54000 villages and 329 towns – big or small, accessible or inaccessible. NCHSE started the work with activities pertaining to data collection from the field which involved pin pointed planning about the field coverage, deployment of field staff along with their orientation training, conducting survey, supervision of field work, compilation of data and scrutiny and quality checks. In subsequent phase, the data entry and validation activities were managed, and a narrative database of all the information was created which was linked to maps of villages, yielding a GIS. To make it easy to use the information for the Health Department’s field functionaries, a special software was created for accessing and working with database. The package works on MapInfo.
All the components of the project – the survey, the data entry and the mapping, were simultaneously carried out by separate teams in full consonance amongst themselves to produce the desired outputs in time. The final product was delivered to the department along with installations of the package done at every Block Medical Office. Special training was also imparted to each and every concerned staff of the department such as B.M.O., District Resource Person, CMO, etc. with a view to give them essential knowledge about features and capabilities of the package. The Department of Health might be the only organization which now possesses all relevant information, in the form of package commissioned at all the basic field offices and with the fully trained manpower to use it. DANIDA has awarded to NCHSE a special certificate of accomplishment of having completed this nearly impossible task satisfactorily, punctually and with high quality.
Following are samples of output of the system: