Space and Global Health/Software/AccessMod

World Health Organisation (WHO) supported collaborative efforts together with a team of experts in geographic mapping to conduct analysis on geographic access to health services. Health care facilities are a key resource to health risk for standard health care. Mobile devices can be used to guide patient to an appropriate health care facility that provide an appropriate health care according to an detected health problem. Health care facilities as resources may cover the needs of population (health risks) or the available health care service may not cover the current demand or calculated demand in case of natural disasters, epidemiological scenarios. The modelling of access to certain service incorporates the access time for the patient to access the service at the health care facility. The modelling results are used to inform policy discussions in low-and middle-income countries regarding inequities across regions. Barriers can be cause by geographic conditions and even unawareness that may create obstacles for the population accessing quality health care.

Accessmod is an Open Source analytic tool on (GitHub), used by WHO as Geographic Information System (GIS) software that works in conjunction with commercial and OpenSource Geographic Information Systems and has included additional analytical functions, such as

• (Capacity) capacity modelling. Later if real time data is available to national governmental ministries of health, the routing of patients can be based on total capacity of each facility to deliver services and the current occupation of the facility.
• (Planing Health Scenarios) AccessMod can run scale up scenarios. These are important functions related to strategic planning and forecasting population health needs.
• (Mobile Devices) guiding and informing patients about appropriate decision for aquisition of specific health care.

(see GitHub Wiki about WHO AccessMod and Github Source of AccessMod5 ).

Learning Activities

Use mathematical modelling to expose a health care system with an epidemiological problem (e.g. infectious disease) and implement these models in an OpenSource software of you choice (e.g. Octave, R, ...).

• What are challenges, requirements and constraints to validate the model?
• Identify different modelling results (e.g. based on historic events, worst case scenario, ...) and conclude different options for improving preparedness.
• How does the access to the health care service change of time? How can you visualize improvement of health care delivery due to additional preparedness measures?

See also

• Risks and Response Maps
• Tutorial for AccessMod