Challenges in Creating Health Catchment Area Geospatial Databases
All stakeholders in the health and humanitarian sector desire to have a central global repository of master health facility lists, health boundary data and catchment areas geospatial databases. This central register will serve as an authoritative source from which all other registries can depend on for basic data on health facilities and catchment areas. The Common Geo-Registry27 for instance seeks to achieve this goal by working with governments to produce, endorse and validate these master lists of health facilities and catchment area databases. However, given the large number of stakeholders who would benefit from these databases, the variety of contexts within which they are used and the complexities in obtaining government support in various territories, the challenge of creating once central source of data can only be overcome with great financial and technical investment, policy guidance and most importantly, collaboration. Some challenges associated with creating centralized health catchment area geospatial databases are outlined below.
The diversity of actors in the health and humanitarian sector who work with health catchment area geospatial databases utilize a variety of methods and metrics in creating them, resulting in discrepancies in datasets that are almost impossible to integrate. One main reason for this challenge is the absence of definitions, policies, and standards to inform these methodologies.
It is currently difficult to obtain reliable data on trusted users, the levels and distribution of administrative access for use and maintenance of these datasets, and data sharing policies to streamline this process.
Standardizing data collection, storage, sharing and maintenance in the context of heterogeneous governance structures for country specific data poses a significant challenge.
Formal boundaries of villages do not exist in most cases, which makes mapping them difficult.
Constantly changing administrative and health boundaries require that health catchment area geospatial databases be updated to reflect these changes. Addition of health facilities for instance changes the landscape for healthcare access.
Alignment of geometries for administrative, health, education and population estimate polygons is difficult to achieve.
In some situations, one village is associated with two or more health facilities, and vice versa. Duplicate names of villages and health facilities are often difficult to reconcile.
Heterogeneity of naming conventions for health facilities across geographies and languages makes it difficult to define and integrate data into one repository.
How to merge top-to-bottom and bottom-to-top approaches in creating health boundary data remains a challenge. How do we identify and define the metrics of a common meeting point of these two approaches?
Problems with using data from OpenStreetMap
Some of the data is not validated or approved by governments or state institutions. This raises questions on its reliability among some stakeholders who hesitate to use them. However, in the absence of government mandated lists, OSM data is sometimes used.
OSM data layers and database composition does not allow for administrative governance of individual data components (e.g supervisor in charge of maintaining health facility layer, supervisor for population estimates, supervision of health boundary layer).
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