Q. Give one exampleS of each of the maintenace task that might be needed once CHIS is in operation.
Ans. The economic life of a system is determined by the ongoing maintenance expenses and proper system maintenance demands well trained professionals. These maintenance activities can be categorized into corrective, adaptive, perfective and preventive maintenance.
After implementing the Child health information system, problems must be detected, investigated and resolved by corrective maintenance. For example, let us consider that a child visits to a particular health centre for the first time and a new record is created for that child and required vaccination or medication is provided to the child after issuing a unique child_id. These details are also stored in the corresponding child records. If the child visits a diiferent health centre next time and produces his unique id, his record must be accessed by this health centre as well to update child information according to the visit. If this does not happen, it is a sytem failure and such problems arise depending upon the type of implementation. There can be other minor errors like improper format for data elements such as grade of the child, age of the child where the required grade ranges from 1-10 but the system is accepting alphabets and age field does not accept both years and months but it is required to store the accurate vaccination info of child. Such requests are usually raised byt the health centre employees and these requests are prioritized and scheduled by the system administrator or review committee. After careful analysis, design and testing the changes are implemented.
In future the Health department may consider the medication details to be stored in the system and also want to make the sytem to be accessible to the aid donor organisations to view the performance reports and services. These new features or system capabilities come under adaptive maintenance. When compared to the new system developed, adaptive maintenance is more difficult because the enhancements must work within the constraints of the existing system.
To improve the system response time, efficiency and reliability, perfective maintenance is initiated by the IT department. This improves maintenance and reduces the risk. As an example, if the staff at the health centre enters invalid input at any of the data fields like gender(other than M/F), grade(not in the range of 1-10), date of visit other than the specified format, a pop-up window should notify the error message to the user to enter the data in a valid format and range. Such small things when taken care of improves the efficiency of users as well as the system. Also abnormal termination of program due to invalid inputs must be avoided.
Preventive maintenance requires analysis of trouble causing areas to avoid the problems. For example, if two or three child records are opened at a time on the system, then the system performance has to be taken care of and see that it does not slow down. If there are multiple health centres sending their periodic reports on the performance to the health department, the network traffic must be effectivel y managed and time taken for sending a reprot and processinga request must me considerably low. This should not worsen the user satisfaction. The system down time and total cost of ownership must be reduced.
