The Child Health Information System (CHIS)
The Health Department of a small third world country has through its Health Centres been monitoring the health of the country’s children for a long time but recently with the increase in population and a decreasing budget it is finding it difficult to cope. The main problem faced by Health Centres is that there is no national system for collecting health data on children. Thus there are no accurate records on the number of children who have been immunized and the type of vaccines they have received, no system for tracking children’s weights so that underweight children can be monitored and no consistent records of what diseases a child might have had in the past.
This information is important for decision makers in the Department of Health as well as aid donor organisations such as the World Health Organisation (WHO). Realising the need for an information system to capture and store health data, the WHO in collaboration with the Health Department, launched the ‘Child Health Information System (CHIS)’project.
As a Systems Analyst consultant, you have been given the task of designing the CHIS. The type of information that the Health Department considers mandatory to be stored in the CHIS include the following:
• Health centre information: Health Centre name, identity number and contact (fax and telephone), population served by the Health Centre
• Child information: child names, child unique identity number, age, gender, school attended by child and the grade,
• Child vaccination information: type of vaccine given to a child on a given visit to the health centre,
• Vaccines: different types of vaccines used by the health centres,
• Child medical visit information: child weight, disease that the child was diagnosed with and the severity level of the diagnosed disease on a given visit to the health centre,
• Diseases: types of diseases commonly found in children.
The system should be accessible at all Health Centres so that information about a child may be viewed and updated from any Health Centre. Assume that all children attend school and that school starts at grade 1 and ends at grade 10. The system should distinguish between two types of child visits to the Health Centre: A vaccination visit and a medical visit. During a vaccination visit a child is given the appropriate vaccination, the Health Centre visited as well as the date of the visit are recorded. During a child medical visit, the weight of the child is taken, the disease is diagnosed, the severity level is recorded, the Health Centre visited as well as the date of the visit. The child is of course given medication but the CHIS does not record this.
Typical information to be stored in the system includes:
• Examples of vaccines: Hepatitis B1, Hepatitis B2, Hepatitis B3, Polio1, Polio2, Polio3, Measles, BCG, DPT.
• Examples of severity levels: Mild, moderate, Severe.
• Examples of common diseases in children: diarrhoea, pneumonia, sore throat, asthma, ear infection, bronchitis, chickenpox etc.
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