Health Department to digitise field-level data collection by ASHA, community health workers

The State Health Department has ordered the rollout of ‘Samasta’, a digital platform for field-level data collection by ASHA workers and community health workers, with the aim of improving the accuracy and availability of health data.The department has said that the volume of handwritten records has affected the accuracy, accessibility and analysis of the data.Although data under various national health programmes is already collected through separate portals, the continued reliance on handwritten records at the field level has affected data quality. The new system seeks to digitise information at the point of collection itself.485 data elementsUnder Samasta, the 485 data elements currently recorded in the ASHA diary have been rationalised to 134 key data elements, with repetitive entries