Hi,
I am working on a form to track the expiry dates of health products in health facilities. I would like to know if I can use the date function to flag expired products, products with less than 3 months shelf life, or products with less than 6 months shelf life. The alert should not prevent the continuation of the form rather it will be used during the data analysis.
Thank you
Welcome to the community, @Jewels92! Could you provide more details on what you intend to do? At the moment I made a quick test and it seems to work (with the following assumption):
For this I used the dynamic data attachment. Is this what you are trying to achieve? Or is it something different?
Thanks for your response @Kal_Lam. However, I believe what I am trying to do is different, I will provide more clarity. I apologize for the lengthy explanation.
My office supports the monitoring of deliveries of public health medicines to a fraction of hospitals in Nigeria. This activity is done on a bimonthly basis following the resupply of the hospital by 3rd Party Logistics (3PL).
There are several objectives for the assessment which include checking the physical appearance of the medicine as well as tracking the expiry date of the medicine supplied by the 3PLs.
The medicines supplied come from a zonal warehouse in Nigeria and there are several brands of the medicine with different batch numbers and expiry dates. The medicines supplied are selected at random for supply. Hence, we cannot always know the actual expiry date of the medicine that will be supplied.
The checklist has a section where we do a deep dive into the resupply details of the medicine. It checks the quantity of the medicine on the proof of delivery (POD), it also checks the quantity indicated on the last mile delivery (LMD) plan, the variance between the quantity on the POD and LMD plan, batch number, and expiry date (this will help us with early warning signs alert).
The early warning signs are used to alert us when a medicine is in circulation that has a short remaining shelf life (RSL). The 3 pressing alerts we use for this assessment: products with less than 6 months RSL; products with less than 3 months RSL and products which are already expired. We use these alerts in several of our excel based analytic tools.
I wanted to know if I can include the early warning sign tracker in the checklist to highlight the medicine with a short RSL to alert the assessor to take the next appropriate steps. Also, this alert should not prevent the assessor to continue in filling out the questionnaire.
Thank you
@Jewels92, so you mean you do not need to enter the data previously. You only need to do it when monitoring. Once entering the details while monitoring, if the expirity data is passed or say it’s approahing the form should flag a message so that the team who is monitoring or entering the details knows the details and stops entering the deatil. Did i now get it correctly?
Partially. correct
Yes,
I am using it for monitoring and I do not need to enter the data previously. There should be a flag message to notify the monitoring team about early warning signs where necessary.
No
The alert should not stop the monitoring team from entering details. They need to continue entering details because there are more than health products that are being monitored and the output of the analysis will be used for report writing and notification of the necessary organization to take further actions.
Is it possible?
@Jewels92, in this case, you could use this approach (that has been discussed previously) to calculate the number of days in between 2 dates to flag the expirity date when collecting your data:
I will try it and give you feedback.
Thanks for your support.
Regards
Thanks, I tried your idea and it worked really well.
Regards
