8 April 2010

Since November Pact has been fully compliant with electronic reporting system for the Ministry of Health, and is now helping other NGOs on their journey toward compliance.

The reporting system is called PRIMHD (the Programme for the Integration of Mental Health Data). The PRIMHD project requires district health boards and NGOs (non-government organisations) to submit client data electronically, with the biggest NGOs already reporting and the smaller ones working towards it.

Pact PRIMHD project manager Dita Ciulacu says Pact has now been reporting for four months.

"In the last one 99.1% of our data was correct so that’s quite huge."

She says the average error rate is around 30% so an error rate of just 0.9% is quite an achievement.

"We are very, very proud of ourselves and our staff doing the recording job," says Dita.

The Otago District Health Board (ODHB) won the Ministry of Health contract to ensure smaller South Island NGOs become PRIMHD ready. THE ODHB then contracted the work in Otago and Southland to Pact because of our success with becoming compliant. Dita was appointed PRIMHD regional coordinator. The only other NGO contracted is the Richmond Trust, which is helping NGOs in Canterbury. The remaining seven coordinators all come from DHBs. Dita meets every three months with the Ministry of Health’s PRIMHD team.

There are 24 NGOs in Otago and Southland which meet the scope of PRIMHD reporting. Dita says she has to build up trust with them because she comes from another NGO rather than the DHB.

"It’s true I’m the competition, but I’m wearing a different hat. I need to know what they are doing and all the detail ... People are a little bit reluctant at the beginning but they figure out they should use my knowledge because it’s helping them."

Pact has been asked if we can host smaller NGOs to provide the reporting for them – essentially extending our database to incorporate other NGOs and using our system to report for them.

"We don’t know about that yet. We are thinking about it," Dita says.

Pact’s contract with the ODHB is for 18 months, ending in February 2011. The ministry wants the medium and small NGO’s PRIMHD compliant by December this year, and Dita will follow up with two months’ support.

Dita says there has been more urgency recently coming from the ministry to get everything completed, which places pressure on regional coordinators and, at the end of the chain, on NGOs.

She says some NGOs are reticent about working to become PRIMHD compliant until they see if future contracts require PRIMHD reporting – or even if they will have their contracts renewed.

"I just try to show them the benefits."

She explains to NGOs they do not need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for the latest software.

"It’s always a compromise. Some money still has to be paid, but it might not be huge."

The DHBs and the six biggest NGOs have already been reporting for 18 months.

"So that means the ministry already has enough data to start producing reports. It’s moving already to the next phase, analysing the data we already have, trying to make sense of it and trying to produce reports because that is the intended outcome of all of this."

The ministry is also aiming at getting some reports back to NGOs.

"Right now it’s a black hole. Unless you have your own system in-house to play with data, you just send data but you get nothing back."

The ministry is also looking at establishing a reporting portal where NGOs can log in and see their own data and data submitted by other NGOs. Dita says this would provide benchmarking in a very honest and fair way.