Community Health Hub

The Community Health Hub- Community-Based Data Collection for Better Health Outcomes

Health workers and health systems must have adequate information to respond to health and health-related needs of the populations they serve including on the social context and determinants of health in different communities. Governments and multilaterals collect health data, but it is often flawed, incomplete, fragmented and rarely uses community-engaged approaches. Communities can provide insider knowledge and understanding that increases validity, relevance and scope of data collection and improve decision-making for health. NGOs, faculty and students from different disciplines gather valuable data during their community-based activities. However, much of the information is unpublished or not digitized. Our solution harnesses the power and potential of information technology to fill this knowledge gap and improve population health, one person at a time.

While patient and family health-seeking behavior and community contexts are key to improving health, community feedback and knowledge is not systematically captured to improve interventions by promoting treatments that work and modifying or replacing treatments that don’t. Communities and new generations of practitioners don’t have access to lessons-learned from older programs or interventions. Findings from research and assessments from different disciplines are rarely shared with communities or local authorities but collected in publications or separate discipline-based databases. Disease surveillance mechanisms rarely reach remote and poor communities as the Ebola epidemic demonstrated. Currently, there is no community-based focal point for data collection and important information and actionable knowledge is lost. Our solution will create this focal point to shape community-specific and provider-specific education with the goal of improving health care and health outcomes, one person at a time.

THEnet: Training for Health Equity Network, a partnership of socially accountable community-engaged health workforce education institutions committed to health equity, advocates for community-engaged education where students spend up to 50% of their clinical training in areas where health workers are most needed—rural and underserved communities. THEnet’s members schools in the Philippines are leaders in community-engaged education and their students live and learn in such communities. Together with the community, they conduct comprehensive community assessments and implement interventional research targeting real community issues.

THEnet proposes the creation of a Community Health Hub. Designed in partnership with communities and stakeholders, the Hub maximizes the impact of students’ community placements by capturing community health assessment data and research outcomes. The Hub, an online data collection tool, allows community health data to be systematically collected and shared. This improves students’ problem-solving skills and ability to work in challenging contexts. The Hub, a mobile app, is accessible by communities, health authorities, practitioners, students, faculty, and NGOs, helping stakeholders make informed decisions and co-create solutions.

The Hub—featuring an expandable dashboard—integrates data, knowledge, and program information from national, local, student and faculty sources with informal feedback from communities and allows graduates working in underserved communities to systematically provide feedback to improve health education. Together, community-engaged education and the Hub maximize the use of scarce human and material resources, foster cross-sectoral collaboration and accountability and continuously builds the capacity of the community to address its own health challenges.

Moving the hub of information from academic and/or national statistics institutions to local communities is highly innovative. The technology for the Community Health Hub is not new, but incorporating information from diverse formal and informal sources across sectors is new, and creates a better evidence base for making decisions and developing solutions. Our solution will help democratize health information in these communities and can be scaled up to the regional or national level. 

A community-driven digital platform incorporating diverse formal and informal sources, including different disciplines and sectors, provides practitioners, academics and local health authorities with a more comprehensive picture of the health-related challenges communities face. A tablet/phone-based app makes it easier to capture the feedback of community members and information gathered by students and faculty. It empowers local health workers and communities to contribute to disease surveillance and provides support for community leaders who are implementing public health interventions. The technology will reduce data fragmentation, improve data integrity, and create an innovative platform for adding new technologies including blockchain and artificial intelligence.

1) Find a technical partner to develop the prototype for the digital platform 

2) Commission technical experts to work with the existing multi-sectoral community partnerships to develop teams at 2 THEnet schools in different rural regions of the Philippines to review existing sources and tools, identify the initial priority functions 

3) Engage partners in other regions to review Hub architecture and function to determine global relevance/replicability

4) Develop and test prototype

5) Monitor uptake and effect of the Community Health Hub on students and community members

6) Continue to evolve guidelines to transform education

THEnet has member institutions on five continents working in underserved communities and THEnet keeps expanding these partnerships. We will start piloting the Community Health Hub with 2 of our members schools in the Philippines and then expand to include an additional 10 schools within three years (pending funding). By adding in the Community Health Hub to THEnet’s current and planned tools, we will be able to offer a comprehensive digital hub for transformative education to increase health equity. In this way we expect that the solution will be helping to improve the lives of thousands of people in the future.

The schools we propose working with are active members of our network and have co-planned this solution with THEnet. Other schools have expressed an interest in joining the initiative in the next three years. This will enable us to show results and evidence that the Community Health Hub is having a real impact on health outcomes. This will enable us to convince other institutions to adopt the Community Health Hub technology in their contexts. In addition, we will create and share resources on our online community of practice where we will also provide training and link members. 

The solution has not yet been created so we can’t currently provide information on how many we serve. However, we already have digital tools and resources around social accountability, community engagement and transformative health workforce education that have been accessed thousands of times through our digital platform. We offer an assessment framework for schools, an up to date resource center, and collaborative tools for stakeholders. THEnet already has demonstrated knowledge and success in creating and managing digital tools in health workforce education and we know through experience that there is a need for a Community Health Hub.

We will start out by testing the Hub in 2 municipalities in the Philippines, where our member schools are already using community-based education strategies and have students training in rural and underserved communities. The Ateneo de Zamboanga University proposes a prototype project in 1 municipality serving 6,454 individuals. After the prototype, we will roll the Hub out to their entire community of 31,309 individuals within 3 years. After this we will roll out the Hub on a national level. Concurrently within the three years we will roll out the Hub through THEnet schools in other countries (South Africa, Nepal, Sudan).

THEnet is a connector, capacity developer and community of learning to co-create solutions. Through THEnet’s model of community-engaged education, its partner health workforce schools have produced rural physicians and have built a wide collaborative network. THEnet has proven experience advocating for and connecting member schools and their local partners with global stakeholders, funders and policymakers. We have received global recognition as providing an education model that contributes to universal health coverage. This combination of global and local experience and knowledge is unique and will help us attract resources from both international and local sources to build the Community Health Hub.   

Our non-profit revenue model is to secure funding to build and roll out the Hub and start using it with our two partner schools in the Philippines. After that we will expand it to use in our ten other partner schools. We will ask the schools to use their own resources for this if available or raise funds for this purpose. After this stage, we will have a functioning tool in place and can look to raise revenue by 1) applying for large grants and awards from governments and foundations to fund the expanded use of the Hub; 2) offering consultancies to schools and governments on getting started with the Hub; 3) creating specialized products on a fee basis for schools/governments looking for individualized data hubs and related products. 

We anticipate that through Solve we will be able to find funders and technology partners to maximize the positive impact of our Community Data Hub and educational approach. We also believe we can offer solvers a potential platform to test relevant technological applications and tools. 

The key barriers we face are funding and technical expertise. We need funding to create the Hub, and we need innovative, forward thinking tech partners to help us create open access tools that will meet the needs of the communities who will use them, work in low resource settings, and be customizable and also able to be expanded on and/or updated as we grow.