Public Health

The Public Health area of BridgeERP HMS turns your facility from a treatment centre into a population-health node. It groups every programme that looks beyond the single patient encounter — childhood immunisation, communicable-disease surveillance, chronic-disease registries, the community health worker (CHW) programme, vertical programmes such as TB and HIV, and the statutory returns your Ministry of Health expects. Programme officers, public-health nurses, surveillance focal persons, CHW coordinators and the records office all work from this one menu.

Where to find it

Everything in this area lives under the top-level Public Health application. The main entry points are:

• Public Health → Operations — the immunisation workbench: Children Due, Vaccinations Today, All Vaccinations, Sessions, Defaulters and AEFI Reports. See Immunisation.
• Public Health → Surveillance — the IDSR line list, Outbreaks and Weekly Reports (MoH 705). See Surveillance.
• Public Health → Registries — chronic-disease and condition registries with their Enrollments, Outcomes and cross-registry reporting. See Registries.
• Public Health → CHW Programme — community health units, households, visits, referrals and the monthly summary. See Community Health Workers.
• Public Health → Cases / Register / DOT / Labs / Safety — the vertical TB DOTS and HIV/ART programmes.
• Public Health → Population Health — cohorts, care gaps, provider panels, risk scores and quality measures.
• Public Health → MOH Reports — the statutory return generator and notifiable-disease registry that feed your monthly, quarterly and weekly submissions.

Before you start

Public-health work depends on master data being in place. Configure these first:

• Facilities — each programme stamps its records with a detecting / reporting facility. Confirm your facility tree is set up in the HMS getting-started configuration.
• Immunisation schedules and dose protocols — under Public Health → Configuration → Schedules and Dose Protocols.
• Priority diseases — the IDSR case-definition catalogue under Public Health → Surveillance → Configuration → Priority Diseases.
• Registry definitions — what conditions you track, defined under Public Health → Registries → Registries.
• Community health units and CHWs — under Public Health → CHW Programme → Configuration.

How the area fits together

The programmes are deliberately interlinked so that one event can drive several workflows:

1. A missed vaccine dose creates an immunisation Defaulter, which can be traced by a CHW referral.
2. A suspect case captured on the surveillance line list can be auto-attached to an active Outbreak once thresholds are crossed.
3. A chronic patient is enrolled in a Registry, where structured data elements and outcome events are captured over time.
4. A CHW household visit can raise an urgent Referral into the facility and feed the monthly community summary.
5. All of the above roll up into the statutory MOH Reports returns.

Programme summary

Roles & access

Each programme ships its own security groups so you can give officers exactly the access they need. For example, the immunisation programme has User, Nurse and Manager tiers; surveillance has Officer and Manager; and the CHW programme has Worker, Supervisor and Coordinator. Assign these groups from the user form so that, for instance, a surveillance focal person can notify cases without being able to edit registry definitions.

Reporting & statutory returns

The Public Health → MOH Reports menu is where programme data becomes official submissions. From here you can open the Disease Registry of notifiable conditions, file Case Notifications, watch the Outbreak Dashboard, and generate regulatory returns — weekly (204A/B), monthly (705A/B, 711, 717, 515) and quarterly (731) — with the Generate Batch… wizard. KHIS sync endpoints let the returns be pushed onward electronically.

Vertical programmes — TB and HIV

Alongside the generic frameworks, two disease programmes have their own deep workbenches because they carry heavy national reporting obligations. The TB DOTS programme lives under Public Health → Cases (All TB Cases, On Treatment, Defaulters, MDR/DR-TB and Treatments), Contacts & TPT for contact tracing and preventive therapy, DOT for directly-observed-treatment observations and weight monitoring, Laboratory for sputum specimens, and Safety for adverse events and outcomes; its quarterly return is the MoH 745. The HIV / ART programme spans Clinical (Patients in Care, Appointments, Due for VL, Defaulters, the enhanced-adherence-counselling worklist), Register (ART history, differentiated-service-delivery models, opportunistic infections, outcomes) and Labs (viral loads, CD4 counts), with the MoH 731 as its periodic return. Both feed the same statutory reporting engine as the rest of the suite.

Population health

Where the registries follow individuals, the Population Health menu looks at whole panels of patients to find the gaps. Under Public Health → Population Health you can define Cohorts and Provider Panels, watch Care Gaps (patients overdue for a needed service), plan Outreach Work, assign Risk Scores, and track quality Measures and their results from the Dashboard. This is the layer a quality lead uses to drive proactive recall — for example pulling everyone in a hypertension panel who has missed a blood-pressure check — rather than waiting for patients to present.

Tips & troubleshooting

Public Health menus at a glance

The following menus map each programme to the model behind it, so you can confirm you are in the right list before you start.

Vertical-programme case states

The two vertical programmes carry their own enrolment lifecycle. Knowing the states helps you read the worklists and the statutory cohorts correctly.

Roles matrix

Each programme ships its own security category, so you can grant exactly the access an officer needs.

Troubleshooting

Related

• Immunisation
• Disease surveillance
• Registries
• Community health workers
• Ambulance & dispatch