About DGIS
Each year the Maternal and Child Health Bureau (MCHB) awards nearly 900 discretionary grants that help to ensure that quality health care is available to the maternal and child health (MCH) population which includes all of the nation's women, infants, children, adolescents, and their families, including fathers and children with special health care needs.
MCHB’s Discretionary Grant Information System (DGIS) electronically captures financial, performance measure, program, and abstract data about these discretionary grants from the grantees. The data collected are used by MCHB project officers to monitor and assess grantee performance as well as assist in monitoring and evaluating MCHB’s programs.
Released in October 2004, DGIS is a Web-based system that allows grantees to report their data online to MCHB through HRSA’s Electronic Handbooks as a part of the grant application and performance reporting processes. DGIS includes built-in checks and validations to ensure data quality.
The data displayed in the financial data and performance reports are aggregated to report program data. The abstract report displays grantee level data.
Grantees report on the following:
Financial Data:
All MCHB discretionary grants provide budgets and expenditures for each year of the grant. Budgets are
broken down by source of funding and category of service for all grants. Grants that focus on direct,
enabling or population-based services also provide a budget breakdown by the class of
individuals served. Expenditures are reported by the grantee after the end of a grant year.
Performance Measures:
MCHB developed 37 national performance measures across many maternal and child public health areas.
The measures are either percentage-based or scale-based measures. Percentage-based measures use
numerators and denominators to generate the annual indicator, while scale-based measures use data
collection forms to generate the annual indicator. MCHB uses the annual indicators to determine if a
grantee is meeting their goals.
Performance measure data are not only important to determine whether a grantee is meeting its goals, but it also helps identify data trends that can be helpful in determining areas that need technical assistance. Performance measures are assigned by the MCHB program and programs can have one or more performance measures assigned. Only measures where the data are collected directly from MCHB grantees in DGIS makeup DGIS Web Reports.
Program Data:
DGIS supports collection of four additional data element forms for specific MCH programs that require
additional data not captured in the abstract or the performance measures. These forms include the
Training Data Form (Training program), Injury/EMS Data Form (Emergency Medical Services for Children
program), CSHCN Data Form (Children with Special Health Cares Needs program), and Healthy Start Data
Form (Healthy Start program).
Abstracts:
Grantees submit an abstract of a grant’s goals, objectives, methodology, results, evaluation, and
annotation annually. Abstracts can be searched many ways in DGIS Web Reports.
Comments and critiques on the DGIS and its business processes are gathered from users. This user feedback assists in developing future releases of DGIS to improve the ease of use and data quality.
