Uwe Wahser: Construction of an Adapted Health Information System
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4.5. Implementation and Maintenance of the Components

As mentioned before, preliminary versions of "Kabarole!" were installed for a step by step introduction to the data entry clerks. These were the program versions 0.1 and 0.2. The implementation of version 0.3 for actual use with real data was done during the last week of deployment in the district. The conduction of the initial installation procedures, which require a deeper understanding of the structure of the software application product, was done by the author of this thesis. These activities have to be carried only for the installation of "Kabarole!" and do not require a training of staff. They are described in section 6.2.1. "Installing 'Kabarole!' for a New District" of annex M. The setup of "Kabarole!" with data about the district was done mainly by the statistician as part of training on the job. The health units were installed, services and groups were defined and data entry forms for the MF77 report form were created. This setup can easily be subjected to change later on. Therefore the statistician must be able to conduct these activities by himself. Chapter 5. "Set Up Guide" of annex M contains a description of the relevant activities. After a one month vacation, the author of this thesis revisited the district for two days to observe, how "Kabarole!" was performing in real life. By this time, reports from two months had been entered. The resulting amount of data revealed a serious performance problem for the retrieval of data. The calculation of the monthly summary report took almost one hour and the retrieval of a single report of one health unit required about ten minutes. The inspection of entered reports was therefore very strenuous for the data entry clerks. The reasons for the performance problem were identified mainly in the realization of the "RField" object type from the conceptual data base scheme. It had been realized as a single data base file. The size of this file after two months of data entry slowed down the retrieval functions. Therefore the need became obvious to streamline the physical data base scheme as mentioned in the description of the design of the database scheme in section 4.4.3. "Construction of the Software Application Product". This task had to be done after returning to Germany, since it also required changes in the algorithms used in "Kabarole!". After the corrections were made, version 0.4 of "Kabarole!" was sent to the district, including a utility for the conversion of the existing data base. The necessary steps for updating the old version were described very detailed in an additional letter to enable the statistician to do the updating by himself. Finally the manual from annex M was sent to the district, along with version 0.5 of "Kabarole!", which contained some minor corrections.
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This page was constructed by Uwe Wahser (uwe@wahser.de)
Last Revision: May 1996