The Global Healthsites Mapping Project is building an open data commons of health facility data with OpenStreetMap. We believe that by leaning on the methods and infrastructure of OpenStreetMap, baseline health facility data can be maintained.

The Global Healthsites mapping project
https://youtu.be/S5Y-A_unnuc

Le projet de cartographie des sites de santé mondiaux
https://youtu.be/gas5D8CSs2U

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Global_Healthsites_Mapping_Project

Key activities of Healthsites include:

1. Enabling National health agencies and organisations to share and contribute data to OpenStreetMap
2. Enabling collaboration between national health agencies and volunteer communities
3. Connecting multiple data streams to build higher quality data
4. Explore Human Centered Design to drive the development of the data

Saving health facility data to OpenStreetMap improves interoperability and harnesses the contributions of citizens, academic institutions, businesses and organisations who use the data in their daily operations. In addition to cost savings, improved health facility data supports epidemic preparedness, immunization programs, disaster response, Maternity care and Health capacity planning.

When a natural disaster or disease outbreak occurs there is a rush to establish accurate health care location data that can be used to support people on the ground. This has been demonstrated by events such as the Haiti earthquake and the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. As a result, valuable time is spent establishing accurate and accessible baseline health data. Healthsites establishes this data and the tools necessary to upload, manage and make this data easily and readily accessible. The data is published to the Humanitarian Data Exchange where the #HXL tag is applied. HXL is a simple standard for messy data. Use HXL hashtags to speed up data processing and create interoperability across data sources. Please get in contact if you have idea's for data mashups you'd like to see.

Healthsites convene's an Emergency Health data call where we define priority user stories in support of this baseline health facility data. These priority user stories allow us to identify which services are the most important.

Examples:

As a pregnant mom expecting twins I would like to know where the nearest emergency care facility is so that I know where to go if I experience complications during childbirth
As an epidemiologist I want to know which health facilities have ICU beds so that I can support patients suffering from disease

Identified attributes = Emergency care, ICU beds

Get in touch if you have stories to share and /or would like to join the call.