Generic conventions

Support - Assistance technique
1

Hi everyone,

Are any available materials/docs about standardized data elements conventions and definitions to ensure consistency?

Thanks

2

For having seen a lot of dhis2 instances I don’t think there’s one and that fits all.

Even data elements that would looks like “standard” always end up specific to each country/project, ex “ANC 1st visit”

  • Dis-aggregation through category option combos (ex age/sex) might probably vary.
  • Condition of inclusion in the “count” might vary also (ex delays in encoding, procedure fully followed according to national standard or not, “official” paper work,…)

Some international standard exist for some classification like ICD or snomed codes
Having naming convention would help but are probably specific to your project.

You might be interested in the following custom apps

For naming I often end up with

  • use an affirmative ton, “non question alike” name (put that question in the formName)
  • sometime try to disambiguate the valueType in the name (ex is this is not a number try to indicate the value type, or put the units ex months, days, %, …)
    • Stethoscopes available : if it’s number ok, but it’s a boolean ?
    • Delays in lab results communication : is it a boolean, a number in days, weeks, for which decease ?
  • often prefixed by a namespace per “silo” of the health system (shortName might end up without that prefix or as a suffix)
  • check the name/shortname to be clean (trimmed of extra spaces at the beginning/end of the name, not 2 spaces, not special char like quotes from office suite that hard to type)
  • avoid roman numbering, for numbering prepare for futur 1 vs 01 (computers and dhis2 don’t have natural sort of number : 1,10,11,2,3,4,5,…)

note that you can add extra fields on the data elements to “improve” the documentation through custom attributes or links to other systems.

3

Sorry I found this in the dhis2 documentation : Naming Conventions - DHIS2 Documentation

It will hard to enforce anything if there are multiple person configuring/administrating the dhis2. IMO scheduling a regular task you can review “lately created” datelement and verify their names/types/… is a good practice.
You can use the api to get a list of these data elements created lately

https://play.im.dhis2.org/stable-2-41-1/api/dataElements?fields=id,name,created&filter=created:gte:2020-04-21
1 Like
4

Hi Fernando,
If you want to send me your list of Data elements and Indicators, I can review it and see what, if any improvement or suggestions can be made
My email address is norah@hisp.org
Norah Stoops