This week's introduction

The main focus of this term is to dive deep into our HIFIS 4 configuration. We’re going to be looking at things like which fields we want to make mandatory and which options we want in each drop-down menu. This whole portion of the project, however, is really tempting to skip. It’s easy to assume that HIFIS will work for you right out of the box and your staff will put data in and it will work fine.

The fact is that this may be true! You may not need to analyze every option in every drop-down menu! That could take you a really long time and take you down some rabbit holes you don’t need to explore. However. We’ve worked with enough communities on their HIFIS 4 launches that we know that communities that skip this important planning phase are creating difficulties for themselves down the line. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, or next week or even next month, but certainly by the end of the year someone is going to complain that they need to report on some target and they aren’t able to obtain the data that they need.

This week, we're focusing on identifying what data you need and we're going to be spending most of the rest of this Term making sure you're capturing it.

Reference Materials

• HIFIS 4 Configuration Guide, pages 28-30