Improving Quality and Use of the National Tuberculosis Program Health Workers Data Report

The project aims to improve equity, access, and quality of tuberculosis (TB), family planning, and maternal and child health services. The Integrated Tuberculosis Information System (ITIS) is the national reporting system of the National Tuberculosis Program (NTP), managed and maintained by the DOH Knowledge Management Information Technology Services (KMITS). All health facilities within the NTP Network are required to utilize ITIS for official TB data recording and reporting. Health workers providing TB services within the NTP network are given an ITIS user account to access the system. Two directories exist within ITIS: the Facility Directory and the Personnel Directory. The NTP Facility Directory was created first and started as a registry of facilities providing TB services before eventually expanding to contain health workers supporting or providing TB services in these facilities. The registry of the TB health workers eventually became the NTP Personnel Directory. The health facilities, with support from KMITS, populated the NTP Personnel Directory in ITIS with their respective personnel providing TB services. As a result of the implementation of the NTP Personnel Directory in ITIS, health workers' information is recorded twice in the ITIS database. Within ITIS, there are 17,627 records of user accounts and 15,313 records of health workers in the personnel directory. A record remains in ITIS regardless of a user's activity level or whether the health worker is an active or inactive TB health provider. To synchronize the health worker records in ITIS, the NTP and KMITS will streamline the process for issuing ITIS user accounts; they will validate the health worker's records in the NTP Personnel Directory before issuing a new user account. To operationalize this process, existing ITIS records of health workers' data needed to be mapped and migrated between the user and personnel tables. USAID's HRH2030 project is providing technical assistance for this mapping and migration, with the goal to improve the availability, completeness, and accuracy of health worker data in ITIS. The data mapping and migration activity involved reviewing the records in the ITIS personnel and users tables. The ITIS data dictionary also served as a reference to ensure the proper interpretation of the data recorded in ITIS. A non-disclosure agreement was signed by HRH2030 prior to the start of the activity to comply with the requirements set by KMITS regarding confidentiality, privacy, and security of information. The extracted ITIS data in this report are from February 2019. The activity methodology included creating a script to read respective tables in ITIS and generate the corresponding standard query language (SQL) statements to run in ITIS database in order to map and migrate the health workers' records in personnel and users tables, as required by the activity objective. Before HRH2030 created the bulk SQL statements, KMITS validated the SQL statement, checking that it was correct and produced no errors when run in ITIS. HRH2030 conducted random checks on the generated SQL statements to ensure accuracy. The goal of the data mapping and migration activity is to improve the availability, completeness, and accuracy of health worker data in ITIS so that the data can be readily shared in the National Health Workforce Registry, as soon as the systems to guide this process are in place.