Health Utilization and Capacity Assessment, Research

Impact on health care system by Syrian refugees. 331 health facilities surveyed, 131,000 patient records collected. 

By way of providing the reader with another case study example, for the World Health Organization (WHO) in Jordan in 2014, i-APS conducted an assessment of the utilization and impact of Middle Eastern refugees on government health care facilities and health system capacity.

We engaged with the Jordan Ministry of Health to gain an understanding of its system for creating and storing health records and the validity of those records. The i-APS team then led the development of the tools and design for the data collection methodology with inputs from the Ministry of Health, Harvard University (our junior partner), and the WHO. We also partnered with UNHCR, UNICEF and UNFP, which provided feedback on the tools, data collection methodology and the draft and final reports.

For this assignment, i-APS contracted with the Jordan University of Science and Technology, which provided 120 nursing students to be trained as enumerators. Over five days, i-APS team of nine technical experts in fields that included medicine and IT data collection, as well as technical experts from Harvard University, trained the nursing students off-site and at the health facilities in the use of the Open Data Kit mobile data collection tool.

The i-APS team was able to evaluate 331 hospitals and clinics, collecting more than 131,000 records over a 30-day period using the Open Data Kit software. The final report was used by WHO, UNHCR, UNICEF and UNFP to inform the design of future programming to meet the health care needs of Middle Eastern refugees in Jordan.