Maps4health

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Maps4health? What is the connection between healthcare and maps? The 1854 London Cholera Outbreak map developed by Dr. John Snow is considered one of the very first example of Geographic Information System (GIS). Dr.Snow developed a sort of proto-GIS supporting his theory that cholera was a water-borne disease. His analysis showed a connection between number of cholera deaths and wells location.

By Paola Fava

This is just a very first example of the linkage between health and maps. Maps can be used for complex geographic analysis of health indicators but also simply to identify the exact location of health centers or healthcare services.

Particularly in emergency situations, such as the 2014 Ebola crisis in West Africa, maps were used to locate health facilities, laboratories, schools, wells and any other significant infrastructure that could provide information to support aid workers facing the emergency. Combining this information with other indicators such as population data, number of disease cases, etc… maps provided a better overview of the disease widespread and its effects. Hpfblog2ere is an example of maps developed by WHO showing, on the left, the location of laboratories in the areas affected by Ebola Virus in 2015 and, on the right, the number of Ebola cases in October 2014.

Identifying the exact location of health facilities is not always an easy task, especially if using a top-down approach, asking government bodies, health authorities or organizations.

On this regard, healthsites.io is an interesting tool, that uses an alternative, bottom-up approach to identify healthcenters around the world, providing information such as their geographic position, services provided, number of full time/part time beds, staff availability, etc…The application is an opendata initiative, therefore freely available and anybody can contribute by using their Facebook or Twitter account.
It’s a project co-founded by Mark Herringer, Tim Sutton and Dražen Odobašić, and supported by many partners such as ICRC, MSF, HIF (International Hospital Federation), the Health Care in Danger project and HOT(Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team).

pfblog3

Healthsite.io can be particularly useful in emergency situation, (i.e.: in case of disease outbreaks or natural disasters) in order to have baseline data or assess damages or even, more importantly, to help people seeking for medical care. Of course, the main challenge is to verify the information and keep it updated but the network of organizations behind it, such as the Humanitarian OpenstreetMap Team (HOT), MSF and ICRC, is already a great start!

Photo credits:
Main photo: Ted Eytan
Photo1,2: WHO EbolaMaps
Photo3: Healthsites.io

Digital Health Information Fragmentation

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Small health centres in remote villages in some regions of Africa can be quite crowded places…
Those crowds are not only made by patients but also by NGOs’ and organizations’ staff who are running their programs by bringing different types of medicines or collaborating with health staff to collect healthcare information.
Each organization brings its own project, maybe a pilot one, with a good amount of requests or activities to be implemented. So, for example, beside already established standard government forms or registers, community Health Workers (CHWs) are asked to fill out additional forms/registers.

Although the final objective should be to facilitate their work and improve the provision of health care to the most needed, unfortunately this often creates an extra burden to the already understaffed facilities, it generates confusion, overload and waste of precious time on bureaucracy, time that should be rather spent on patients’ care. Furthermore, health workers may receive incentives for the extra workload, thus changing work priorities resulting in poor/ late reporting of standard and well established data to the Ministry of Health.

Many of those pilot projects also involve the use of digital information, using digital data instead of paper forms.

A significant example of the fragmentation of digital health programs is illustrated on the measles map of Uganda developed by Sean Blaschke at UNICEF, as mentioned by Dikki Sepfblog5ttle in his post on Pathblog. The map itself explains why in 2012 the ministry of Health in Uganda called a halt to all eHealth and mHealth Initiatives in the country until they got approval from the Director General of Health Services. The objective was to limit the fragmentation of programs and make sure that the data collected up to that point would feed into the national digital Health Information System, rather than creating additional parallel systems.

The widespread of digital information is already a step forward towards the integration of information as ICT can facilitate the information and data exchange especially if data is collected in appropriate and compatible format.

However, we are still quite far away from the final objective…. And, as David McCann wrote in one of his post on ICTworks about the situation in Uganda, reality sounds more like this:
” You’ve managed to track drug stock-outs in a sub-county in Moroto using solar chargers and 50 Samsung Galaxies. That’s great, can we share data with a similar project I did using BlackBerries in Gulu? Probably not. You’ve rolled your own drug-stock-tracking application. And yet when members of Big Aid met with the Ministry of Health, to account for the overlapping features of their mHealth applications and whether API integration is possible, one actually responded along the lines of “well, it’s backed by a relational database, so in theory, yes.” While true, this misses the intent of the question by a wide margin’.

Maybe the halt promoted by the Ministry of Health in Uganda is a way towards increasing interoperability and coordination of projects. For sure, it indicates that government has started to look into taking ownership of these projects and technology to serve the population’s needs.

In other countries specific mobile-health groups, such as the mhealth working group in Malawi, are meeting regularly, with the involvement of the Ministry of Health, to face the issue of integration and overlapping of mobile health projects.

Both the use of compatible technologies and the involvement of stakeholders at various levels are two key elements to start overcoming the problem of mhealth projects fragmentations.

By Paola Fava

Photo source: Margherita Dametti for COOPI