¶ SIMS
The Site Improvement through Monitoring System (SIMS) is a quality assurance tool used to monitor and improve program quality at PEPFAR-supported sites that guide and support service and non-service delivery functions. For this purpose, the FYJ project has developped a data collection tool based on the 16 sets of forms under the Site Assessment section of the tool. The forms are hosted on ODK-Central, a platform that enables the use of Xforms.
¶ The Challenge
Site Assessment tool contains 16 sets of forms with a total of 140 cees that are aggregated from over 1,300 Data Elements. These Data Elements each have detailed questions and/or labels that are displayed as encoded titles (IDs) on the submissions output. The process aims to find an efficient way to match the encoded titles to the question or label associated to it - in a manner that enables appropriate visualizations.
¶ The Solution
Due to the nature of the detailed questions and/or labels, the representation of the output needs to be referenced to a lookup table. This lookup table contains the IDs of all the Data Elements in one column and their respective question and/or label in another column. It is a static table that is relevant to SIMS version 4.1, and will be hosted on FYJ's SIMS BigQuery Data Warehouse.
Once the submissions have been extracted from ODK (daily), they will be transformed to enrich the data with the Facility Name. They will also be enriched with text on responses where the user had to choose between multiple choices (which are encoded as well). Each set's submissions will then be transmitted to Google Cloud Storage and finally to BigQuery Data Warehouse.
Finally, there is a secondary static lookup table, with MFL Codes and organizational unit heirachy details, that will be used to further enrich the data.