Availability: Real-time healthcare system capacity

To what extent is information about the real-time capacity of the healthcare system available as open data?

Definitions

Definitions and Identification

To be useful, real-time or near real-time data about the capacity of the healthcare system should be available at the level of individual facilities and include details such as the number, type, and availability of beds, tests, vaccines, and devices.

Among other functions, it should be possible for different actors to use real-time data about the capacity of the healthcare system in various ways:

• for everyday individuals to locate where to take loved ones for treatment or where to obtain vaccines;
• for journalists, civil society organizations, and government officials to identify disparities in the healthcare system that will disproportionately impact members of marginalized communities;
• for government officials to determine where and when to build surge or overflow facilities;
• for healthcare providers to direct patients with COVID-19 symptoms to facilities with the current capacity to treat them;
• for a wide range of actors to understand where resources are scarce and work to fill gaps in personal protective equipment (PPE), medical devices, vaccines, etc.

Research Guidance

This indicator emerges from data practices observed in conjunction with the coronavirus pandemic; the working assumption is that data will be found on COVID-19-related websites, run by the government, academia, or civil society.

In countries where infection counts have significantly decreased, this data may have been available in 2020 but may no longer be being updated in 2021. Many government COVID-19 response sites include archives of past data; we suggest checking the date ranges corresponding to peaks of infection in your country. However, if these peaks happened early in the global progression of the pandemic, we also recommend checking archives several months later, as countries' data-reporting practices have evolved considerably over the course of the pandemic.

Starting points

• Search:
  • National or sub-national government websites about how and where to go for testing and treatment of COVID-19.
  • Websites of civil society organizations or mutual aid societies that provide information about testing or treatment of COVID-19.
  • Websites of your country's national or local public health department, center for disease control, or center for health statistics.
• Consult:
  • Public health officials.
  • Records and analytics staff at healthcare facilities who are likely to know what information is reported, to whom, and how often.
  • Open data experts, programmers, and technologists who have organized data collaboratives or participated in other data-related efforts for COVID-19 response and recovery.

What to look for?

To complete the assessment for this question you will need to access and explore the available data. This may involve running queries on datasets to check the variety of fields included.

Look for evidence that can answer the following questions:

• Does the data include information about the capacity of individual facilities that reflects real-time or very recent changes? Or does capacity information only speak to long-term capacity, not how it is currently being used?
• Does the data include specific details, such as the number and availability of beds, tests, vaccines, and devices?

National and sub-national considerations

In some countries, sub-national departments of health may have different practices with regard to what capacity data they make available. Additionally, in some countries, data may be available only for hospitals in major cities.

Focus on national government first, and then assess whether:

• National datasets also include data from sub-national or local government units;
• Equivalent data exists for a selection of sub-national or local government units, but is not nationally aggregated;

To assess countries where data about healthcare system capacity is organized sub-nationally, researchers should select the strongest example of sub-national practice, and then indicate whether this is an outlier or an example of widespread practice.

Question sub-components

Show/hide supporting questions

Existence

• Is this data available online in any form?
  • Data is not available online.

    Supporting questions: Are there other offline ways to access this data in the country? (e.g., attending an office to inspect it).

  • Data is available, but not as a result of government action.

    Supporting questions: If government is not providing access to data, how is this data available? Please provide a URL(s) for where this data can be found.

  • Data is available from government, or because of government actions.

    Supporting questions: Please provide a URL(s) for where this data can be found.

Elements

• Data fields and quality:

• The data includes information at the level of facilities. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If real-time healthcare system capacity data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL(s) where facility level data is located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• The data includes detailed information about the number and availability of regular beds and ICU beds. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If real-time healthcare system capacity data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where available beds data is located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• The data includes detailed information about the number and availability of medical devices or supplies, such as ventilators or oxygen cylinders. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If real-time healthcare system capacity data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where available devices data is located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• The data includes detailed information about the number, type, and availability of COVID-19 tests. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If real-time healthcare system capacity data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where COVID-19 tests data is located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• The data includes detailed information about the number, type, and availability of COVID-19 vaccines. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If real-time healthcare system capacity data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where available COVID-19 vaccines data is located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Data openness, timing, and structure:

• Dataset is available free of charge. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Data is openly licensed. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If No: If there are explicit restrictions placed on re-use of the dataset, briefly describe those here.

  If Partially or Yes: If the data is provided with an explicit open license, please provide the name of the license, or a link to it here.

• Data is available in all the country’s official or national languages. If the country has no official or national languages, data is available in the major languages of the country. (No, Partially, Yes) Assess this against the list of official, national, or in-use languages you provided as part of your response to the governance indicator that asks, "To what extent do relevant laws, regulations, policies, and guidance require that data collection and publication processes be available in the country’s official or national languages?"

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please briefly describe the language coverage available.

• There are accessible and open official tools available to help users explore data. (No, Partially , Yes) Answer 'Partially' if tools make it possible to get at extracts of data without having to download a full dataset. Answer 'Yes' if there is an interactive tool that displays user-filtered extracts of the data to answer simple questions without downloading data at all.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide URL.

  If Partially : What are the main barriers to accessibility and usability?

• Data includes dynamic updates. (No, Partially, Yes) A common example of dynamic updating can be seen in displays that change in response to new, real-time or near real-time data, often with a detailed timestamp featured prominently.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially: Please explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Historical data is available that allows users to track change over time. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

  If Partially or Yes: For what time period(s) (e.g., start and end dates) is data available?

• Data is provided in machine-readable format(s) (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide a URL where this machine-readable data can be found. (Additional URLs can be included in the justification and supporting evidence)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide a comma separated list of the formats available? (E.g. csv, json)

  If Partially: What prevents you from assessing this data as fully machine-readable?

• The machine-readable dataset is available as a whole (No, Partially, Yes) Answer no if it's only possible to access individual records; Answer partially if it's possible to export extracts of the data; Answer yes if there are bulk downloads or APIs providing access to the whole dataset without financial, technical or legal barriers.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide a URL where bulk download access is available or described.

  If Partially or Yes: If bulk access is provided through an API, please provide a link to where the API is described.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Negative scoring:

• This information is missing required data. (There is no evidence of data gaps., There is evidence that a portion of mandated data is missing., There is evidence of widespread omissions in mandated data.) In cases where the indicator itself identifies a dataset(s) to assess against or a separate governance indicator has asked you to determine data requirements of a relevant governing framework, assess against that. In cases where there is no such identified dataset(s) or related governance indicator, assess based on the parameters laid out in the publication of the information (e.g., are some fields entirely empty when they shouldn't be?), your local knowledge (e.g., if the data is supposed to include information for all public officials, does the number of total entries look right?), and any broader research you may have done for this theme (e.g., have media articles decried the incompleteness of the data?).

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If There is evidence that a portion of mandated data is missing. or There is evidence of widespread omissions in mandated data.: Please briefly explain.

Extent

• How comprehensive is the data assessed for this question?
  • The data assessed covers one or more localities, but there are many other localities without available data, or with data of a lesser quality.

    Supporting questions: Which locality does this data cover?

  • The data assessed covers one or more localities, and is a representative example of the kind of data that can be found for most but not all localities.

    Supporting questions: Which localities does this data cover?

  • The data assessed provides national coverage.

Indicator Justification

Healthcare system capacity data supports governments and other actors in distributing resources to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages (SDG 3). This is particularly critical in the urgency of a public health crisis like the coronavirus pandemic. As the WHO COVID-19 Strategic Preparedness and Response Plan (SPRP 2021) notes, "Health care systems and workers...are under extreme pressure in many countries in terms of capacity and capabilities, financial resources, and access to vital commodities and supplies including medical oxygen"(8). Real-time or near real-time data about a healthcare system's capacity can help direct patients to available care and support distributing resources equitably and effectively.

With the rise of highly infectious COVID-19 variants, the continued dynamic and uncertain course of the pandemic, and the uneven global distribution of vaccines, it will be considerable time before the pandemic is contained. In the meantime, real-time or near real-time capacity data can both help public health departments respond to changes in the pandemic, and help ensure the continuity of essential health services, providing a foundation from which to build readiness for other health emergencies.