Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Village Health Nurses and Sector Health Nurses are to be entrusted in
submitting the disease and syndrome data. However, Village Health Nurses
and Sector Health Nurses are informed only if the Primary Health Centre
detects a cluster of common symptoms. Ideally, we would want the Village
Health Nurses and Sector Health Nurses to submit all symptoms. How they
are to receive or extract information pertaining to all the symptoms reported
by patients is a question.
Health officials: Medical Officer of Health staff in Sri Lanka and Deputy
Director of Health Services office staff in Tamil Nadu will be conducting the
automated and manual analysis of the data. It is doubtful that they will have
the same level of advanced statistical analysis knowledge to detect adverse
events that are not quite obvious, which usually an astute physician or epi-
demiologist has.
13.5.2 Optimal Set of inputs, Outputs, and Functionality of iCT System
The partners or teams designing and developing the necessary standards,
software, and protocols are expected to use the tables following as a guide
for developing precise specifications, which will be documented in the
soft-
ware requirement specifications.
. It is evident that the designers and developers
will need to expand on this and introduce more attributes and relationships
to build working solutions.
13.5.2.1 Gathering of Disease and Syndrome Data
In Sri Lanka, the Suwadana Centre Volunteers, and in Tamil Nadu, Primary
Health Centre staff (like the Sector Health Nurse) and Village Health Nurse
will be providing a minimal set of information, through mobile phones, for
the purpose of analysis and detection of adverse health events. The neces-
sary and sufficient set of attributes is listed in Table 13.2. These health work-
ers will visit the healthcare providers, periodically, or use other means to
retrieve in- and outpatient data from the registries to digitize and send to the
central database. They should be able to record the relevant data in a digital
form at a rate of 15 seconds per record. Each of the health facilities in Tamil
Nadu and Sri Lanka cater to a minimum of 100 patients on average per day.
These patients visit the facilities between the hours of 8 a.m. until 1 p.m. in
the afternoon. Hence, a medical officer will spend approximately 2-3 min-
utes with each patient. Given the time constraint, the data entry cannot take
more than 10% of the patient care time, that is, 12-18 seconds, which sets the
design benchmark for data entry at 15 seconds on average.
13.5.2.2 Relational Database for Storing Gathered Data
The relational database must, at least, possess the attributes defined in
Table 13.3. The relational data structure (i.e., schema) will contain more
