Completeness and Timeliness
About completeness and timeliness in DHIS2
Completeness of reporting indicates whether facilities have reported on the data they are
supposed to report on, while timeliness indicates whether these reports were delivered on
time. Timeliness is calculated based on a whether the reports have been completed within
a set number of days after the end of the reporting period (15 days on the Sierra Leone
demo server). Thus if a report for January is completed on February 16th, it will count
towards the completeness of reporting, but not the timeliness.
The most common way of calculating completeness is by basing it on the Complete
function in data entry. This checks whether an organisation unit has entered data and
clicked the complete button for a certain period and a certain data set.
Completeness can also be checked based on compulsory data elements. Certain data
elements in a data set can be set to be compulsory, typically data elements for which one
can be certain that there will be values. For example, on a outpatient morbidity dataset, a
small facility might not have data for most of the diagnosis, but they will have some data
for how many attended in total. Thus the attendance data element can be made
compulsory, and then be used as proxy for completeness by looking at the proportion of
compulsory data elements there is data for.
Reporting Rate Summary
Checking completeness in DHIS2 can be done in several ways. The focus here is on the
Reporting rate summary, which is one of the most basic tool. To get to reporting rate
summary, choose Services and Reports from the top menu.
Once in the Reports module, we are interested in the Reporting rate summary.
The left hand side of the Reporting rate summary box has the same organisation units tree
as when doing data entry. The completeness rates are aggregated, so that looking at an
organisation unit at the district level will give you the rate based on data from all
organisation units in that district, not just for the data sets that have been entered the
district itself.
On the right, there are two radio buttons where you can choose whether to look at
completeness rates based on whether or
not the dataset has been marked as
complete using the Complete button in
data entry, or based on compulsory data
elements (as explained above).
The next step is to choose what data sets
to check completeness for. If choosing
[Select data set/View all], you will see the
completeness rate and timeliness for all
dataset for the selected organisation unit.
Alternatively, you can look at the
completeness/timeliness for one particular data set for the selected organisation units, as
well as all its children (the children of a district is all the chiefdoms in that district).
The last step is to select the period. Naturally, the period you select have to be the same
or longer than the reporting frequency of the data set. Trying to show the monthly
completeness for a data set reported yearly will give you a blank report. However,
selecting a longer period than that of the data set will give you the overall completeness
for that period. In the example below, completeness for the first quarter of 2012 is selected
for the «PHUF 1 - Morbidity» dataset for «Bo» district. The completeness is based on
«Complete data set registrations».
All the chiefdoms in «Bo» are listed from highest to lowest reporting rate, with the overall
reporting rate for «Bo» at the bottom. The report can be downloaded in Excel, PDF or CSV
format. The meaning of each of the columns are explained in the table below.
Name
Name of the organisation unit
Actual reports
Actual reports that have been completed.
Expected reports
Expected number of reports that should have been
completed, based on which data sets have been
assigned to the data set.
Percent
Percentage of the expected reports that have actually
been reported.
Reports on time
Number of the reports that have been completed on
time.
Percent on time
Percentage of the expected reports that were reported
on time.
Completeness rates can also be calculated based on the type or ownership of the facility,
by using the More options button. This allows you to check the completeness rate and
timeliness of for example only private facilities. However, there is not data on this type of
completeness on the demo server.