Resource Type: Report
Authors: Gajinder Pal Singh, Jordan Tuchman, and Michael P. Rodriguez
Published: 05/31/ 2014

Resource Description:

The Government of India has prioritized 184 of the 640 districts in the country for focused maternal and child health interventions under an integrated program called the Reproductive, Maternal, Neonatal, Child and Adolescent Health (RMNCH+A) initiative. A key factor in the success of this initiative is the ability of the government to effectively track health outcomes through the routine collection of data from service delivery points across the high-priority districts.

The National Rural Health Mission (NRHM)1 is responsible for monitoring RMNCH+A indicators across the country and has leveraged the rollout of a web-based national health management information (HMIS) for this purpose. In several states, another information system – the web-based District Health Information System (DHIS) 2.0 – is used. A number of reviews of the data produced through the national HMIS have indicated that there are data quality issues. However, there are limited reviews of data quality taking place across the NRHM facilities and no systematic assessment mechanism is currently in place.

To address these issues, the Haryana State NRHM partnered with the HFG Project to conduct a data quality audit (DQA) across four of the state’s high-priority districts. The DQA exercise took place in December 2013, beginning with a presentation of the methodology to a cadre of Haryana NRHM Program Managers, HMIS Officers, and District Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) Officers. Presented here is a brief summary of the findings and recommendations, sorted by the five domains evaluated in the DQA exercise.