I use ODK to monitor village level hospitals, they are thousands in number, each hospital is supposed to be monitored once in a month, there are many field functionaries who based on the schedule of their field visit monitor a hospital, sometime same hospital is monitored twice in a month which is a problem, because I have to delete duplicate records before the analysis and it a wastage of time and money. I wonder if there a feature in xls form for this or if there is any work around to address this issue. Thanks.
Hi and welcome, @Yasir. We'd love to learn more about your work in hospital monitoring and more when you have a chance to introduce yourself.
Is the same hospital being visited by the same individual or by different individuals? How do functionaries organize their schedules and keep track of what work they have completed currently? In your form, do functionaries see a filtered list of only the hospitals they are supposed to visit? Sharing more about your workflow and ideally sharing your form will help us recommend the most effective and practical techniques.
Thank you so much for your response and apologies for a delayed reply. So, let me explain a bit -
So there are many blocks (administrative block or sub-county) and each block has at least one block coordinator responsible for that block, but there is a lot of transfer and switch.
Each block has 4-5 hospitals, each hospital is supposed to be monitored by a block coordinator, usually singly but sometime jointly in any case one hospital is supposed to be monitored "ONLY ONCE IN A MONTH" so a hospital monitored this month should longer be available for monitoring for the rest of the month, but the moment month changes it should be reset and due for monitoring. Now the problem is that many a times same coordinator or different coordinator mistakenly monitor a hospital which has already been monitored in that month.
Another problem we are facing is that we share QR codes for different project which allows monitors to easily switch between projects. Now many a times they have the QR codes in their mobile but no way to scan it I mean ODK does not have the feature to 'upload from gallery' is there any workaround to scan without a printout or without 2 smartphones.
If data collectors occasionally have Internet access, you could consider representing your list of hospitals as Entities and using an Entity Property to keep track of the last month of visit. The idea is to, when a form is filled out about a specific hospital, update that hospital's last month of visit to the current month. When displaying a list of hospitals to visit, you can filter out any for which the last month of visit matches the current month. This tutorial goes through using a status column to filter out certain Entities. Let us know if you need more details and we could build an example.
Currently Entities are created on the ODK Central server only so that's why I mentioned needing Internet access. We are starting work on offline Entities in Collect which will make it so data collectors immediately see the hospitals that they complete filtered out of the list.
You mean for different ODK Central projects? If that's the case, you should be able to configure Collect using a QR code image. If you're talking about other kind of data, I would encourage you to share it in plain text if it needs to be entered into a form.