Hi, I assume you mean the software DHIS?
In any case, the question touches upon the rationale for an information system. There can potentially be tensions between research and management, with implications for data flow, quality, and relevance. Dhis is mostly used, and designed for, routine health management. For this, the information collected will typically be less detailed and comprehensive than what is needed for medical and even some epidemiological research. But expanding the scope of the system to cater for research can compromise the system's ability to support management. In general, the scope of the system should reflect the aims. Adding more scope to an operational health management information system is generally not advised. If particular research calls for the addition of data to be collected, it might be better to collect this through a survey.
I am not familiar with DHIS, however there is a strong movement towards deriving extra utility from operational health data, such as collected through clinical information systems, to support research, management decision-making and performance or outcomes monitoring. This is especially well managed by embedding national clinical registry data sets within CIS. Cardiac surgery has been doing this for decades and interventional cardiology is following suit. It is true that there are many issues that need to be managed when trying to facilitate the secondary use of clinical information from CIS, but there are evolving standards which can assist with this eg see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2329823/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3570075/
http://jamia.bmj.com/content/early/2012/06/24/amiajnl-2011-000681.full.pdf
It is imperative that EHR and CIS consider the potential secondary uses of the data from the outset to drive value from these expensive systems and research, especially health services research and outcomes research is an important aspect of this. It is the way of the future!
The DHIS is a useful tool for the collection of aggregate health data, based on national indicators. The challenges with DHIS data is the ability to follow patient cohorts, for which an Electronic Health Record (EHR) should be used. The advantages of the EHR include an integrated view of the patient across health facilities and a Master Patient Index (MPI) for cohort analysis. The South African e-Health strategy outlines ten strategic national priorities for eHealth including capacitating health workers, developing data interchange standards and developing applications to support health care delivery. It describes how we plan to move from the DHIS to EHR.
http://www.health-e.org.za/2014/09/11/report-ehealth-strategy-south-africa-2012/
http://www.who.int/ehealth/publications/overview.pdf
Since DHIS is a universal system, data from all levels of healthcare are transferred to the DHIS, where anaylsis, report generation can be done. in terms of research, the DHIS is a good source of reliable data for most researchers in healthcare
I realize this is an old question, but since there are some followers to it I just want to point out that there is a project on RG with lots of references to DHIS2:
https://www.researchgate.net/project/HISP-University-of-Oslo
Most of our research concerns the implementation and use of DHIS2, so there should be a lot of relevant articles there to help answer the original question, or any question you would have around DHIS2.
Since DHIS is instrument for collection, validation , storage , analysis and communication of data , is a very useful tool to provide secondary data for researches, and DHIS have gone through development stages , currently it have been updated to DHIS2. however the global data is not globally freely share, it goes through several restrictions.
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