Health Bulletin 2009

Health MIS in Bangladesh
Introduction
Despite obstacles, MIS (health) made commendable successes recently. Table-7 lists those
successes. The speed may be boosted up tremendously by urgently placing few young,
dynamic, computer literate and capable doctors preferably of public health background. MIS
(health) also desperately needs full time server maintenance engineers to ensure 24h uptime of
Internet database servers and mirror (backup) servers and also full time database programmers
for quick development of web-based database programs and fixing database problems.
The routine jobs of MIS (health) Bangladesh
In the MIS (health) there is mismatch between "the workload of the department" and "its
systems and infrastructure". One frequently used statement can be quoted here to understand
the reason of this failure, which says, "MIS (health) is building the systems now, which were
needed to build 10 years back".
Following are the routine responsibilities of MIS (health):
a. Population information (viz. population size, age-sex distribution, birth rate, death rate, growth
rate, age-specific mortality rates, maternal mortality rate, etc.);
b. Health service statistics (viz. number, type and location of all health facilities, number of
patients treated by each facility in outdoor, indoor and emergency departments, bed utilization
rates, average length of stay, volume of services by category, disease profile, causes of deaths,
etc. from public and private health facilities;
c. Emergency Obstetric Care (EmOC) statistics (in-depth obstetric care related information)
from over 500 health facilities
d. Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI) statistics (age and sex-disaggregated
information of out-patient, emergency and in-patient children, availability and quality of services)
from 275 sub-districts
e. Health workforce statistics (viz. staffing pattern of health facilities, vacancy statement, LPR
list, personal data sheets, health workforce: population ratio, health workforce distribution, etc.;
f. Logistics statistics (viz. number and condition of vehicles and major equipment, etc.);
g. Financial statistics: not done before.
Looking deeper into the problems
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