Table 3 Examples of use of DHIS2 data for decision-making

Biemba et al. 2017 [34]

CHWs use mobile application to:

send weekly reports to health centre supervisors on disease caseloads and medical commodities consumed,

to make drug and supply requisitions, and

to send pre-referral notices to health centres

Biswas 2017 [35]

Verbal autopsies used by local health managers for effective planning and reduction of such deaths in the future leading to:

improvements in 1st delay (decision making)

Improvements in 2nd delays (transferring to referral centre) and

improvement in referrals

Braa et al. 2012 [9]

– Development of indicators to monitor emergency obstetric and neonatal care availability

– Monitoring of quality of antenatal care and skilled birth attendance coverage

– Introduction of maternal death audits

– Introduction of the “couple year protection rate” indicator

– Improved anaemia diagnosis in pregnancy Malaria Programme

– Increased emphasis on bed net coverage

– Monitoring of malaria in pregnancy

– Treatment of confirmed rather than clinical cases, which in some instances resulted in data showing lower malaria incidence

– Investigation of high dropout rates and coverage over 100%

– Identification of double counting, resulting in improved quality control mechanisms

– Introduction of diagnostic criteria to reduce misdiagnosis of pneumonia and malaria

– Reduction of excessive data categories and age groupings

– Routine collection of basic inpatient indicators such as average length of stay and bed occupancy rate

– Focus on signal functions of emergency obstetric care and referrals, not just reporting of complications

– Inclusion of laboratory data to check quality of diagnosis, particularly of malaria, tuberculosis, anaemia and syphilis

– Improvement of OPD reporting to gain a more comprehensive idea of district-wide disease burden

– Development of workload indicators to rationalize staffing needs and advocate for redistribution of staff away from central hospitals