Generation of vital event notifications from DHIS2 for strengthening CRVS system

Abstract

Vital events such as birth, death, marriage and divorce are recorded by the civil registration systems, and they are the major sources of national vital statistics. In most of the developing and under-developed countries, the civil registration and vital statistics systems are non-existent or weak. As a consequence, fertility, mortality and other key demographic information are not calculated from actual data on a continuous basis, these data are rather estimated through survey and do not cover large segments of the population. However, vital statistics data are important to any government for proper planning, resource allocation and development. Manual birth and death registrations is time-consuming and inconceivable for a large population. Information technology has already become an effective tool in the civil registration processes, but the registrar general office for birth and death has to depend on the health department as the birth and death events occur at hospitals and health care facilities. Survey results show that birth registration rate within 45 days of birth is very low and it is only around 3% in Bangladesh. In order to strengthen registration system, coordination between registration agency and health department is necessary and a notification for birth/death event should be reported to the registration agency for further action. To address this issue, we have designed a system that will send a notification to the registrar general office when a birth record is obtained in the health information system. In Bangladesh, the District Health Information System version 2 (DHIS2) is used in the health department for aggregated data collection and reporting purpose. Thus we studied DHIS2 system to see the feasibility of generating birth and death notifications upon collection of field data by the community health workers and designed and implemented necessary interfaces for the field worker, DHIS2 and Registrar general office. The system implementation was accomplished using MySQL as the back-end database and object oriented PHP as the application programming interface.