Globally, countries are expanding health coverage to more of their citizens through the development of national health coverage plans.
Policies, implementation challenges, technologies and models of universal health coverage (UHC) programs vary from country to country. Even so, one challenge all systems face as they move toward national scale is the need for usable data.
As health care ecosystems become more mature, an increasing number of information systems are producing health care and health financing operational data, such as clinical health records, member registries, provider registries and financial claim payments.
While health care systems vary across countries, common trends related to UHC include a focus on primary health care and person-centered integrated care and a shift from fee-for-service provider payment models to reimbursement based on preventive care, quality, and value.
These changes require data to inform policy, to monitor results, and to effectively implement and operationalize care delivery and care financing at a national scale.
Information technology (IT) can play a critical role in how raw data becomes valuable information. IT professionals are challenged with putting the underlying and enabling infrastructure in place to make data accessible and usable.
All data stakeholders, including IT professionals, operational departments, policymakers, data analysts and data users play a part in how data is created, managed and ultimately used.
The overall objective of the Information Technology initiative is to increase knowledge and resources for leveraging IT to effectively and efficiently support providing health care services and paying for those services through sustainable health financing operations.
The proposed scope for the Data Foundations Collaborative team is to:
1. Use or develop a framework that will both meet specific country needs and contributes to the global knowledge base.
2. Focus on building capacity to understand what data exists in current information systems and how it can be made available and usable by addressing common data foundation challenges such as data governance, common data definitions, data linking and integration, and data warehouses. This activity is focused on improving the ability of national and global-level health personnel to articulate what they need for reporting and analytics capabilities from existing information systems and plan for that capability considering the connections between all levels of data flows (i.e., facility, district, province, national, and global)
3. Build a replicable process that is tested for one use case but can be adapted to other contexts.
4. Use a collaborative process to share and synthesize experience across countries.