IEPS Conecta

PHC provision is largely decentralized within countries and local health systems performance typically varies a lot across regions, around the world. In Brazil, for instance, there are 5570 municipalities individually responsible for the delivery of PHC services. Available data suggests these municipalities are achieving significantly heterogeneous health outcomes, even when socioeconomic determinants of health are similar. The quality of the PHC data and health indicators collected across locations is also highly heterogeneous. Lack of accountability, weak state capacity, and limited access to information and to best practices are often barriers for policymaking improvement, especially for the left-behind. 

IEPS Conecta is an online platform that will inform local policymakers about their PHC performance in comparison to their regional peers; and will invite them to get in touch and exchange information, innovations and management practices with their best performing peers. More specifically, IEPS Conecta will promote improvements both in PHC policymaking and in performance measurement in two ways:

• Comparative analyses in a simple and visual way: the platform will provide policymakers with a comprehensive overview of their PHC performance in relation to regional peers based on key indicators (share of live births with adequate prenatal care, vaccination coverage, share of hypertension patients with tracked blood pressure and share of deaths of ill-defined causes). Econometric modeling and auxiliary algorithms identify (nearby) high-performing peers for each key indicator, adjusted for socioeconomic determinants of health and other observables.
• Practice community and networking: policymakers will be invited to voluntarily provide their contact information and to share their knowledge and best practices with their low-performing peers. This solution can be adapted to different contexts, depending on the availability of data and health targets. IEPS Conecta will be a built-in expansion of IEPS Data, an online platform recently developed by IEPS that gathers a wide range of health indicators across locations/time in Brazil and features data visualization, documentation for methods and data sets (https://iepsdata.org.br/). Original data are collected from publicly available sources. To the best of our knowledge, IEPS Conecta has the potential to become the largest-scale platform for improving PHC performance through P2P and for connecting policymakers in the world. We are not aware of any other similar initiatives in LMICs. 

IESP Conecta exists to bridge the gap in PHC management quality between high-performing local health systems and the left-behind. Target users consist mainly of local policymakers, in particular those who live and work in low-performing localities. These policy makers often lack information and knowledge to overcome local challenges. Our solution will provide them with comparative statistics, information, experience and a sense of community potentially relevant to leverage their performance. 

Institute for Health Policy Studies (IEPS) is a nonprofit, independent, nonpartisan organization with the aim of contributing both scientific evidence and advocacy to support the design, implementation and evaluation of health policies in Brazil. Our research team relies on applied econometrics and data science methods to deliver evidence-based knowledge useful for policy making; while our practice/advocacy team works closely with local and national policymakers as well as with other relevant stakeholders to support policy change towards universal health coverage and equity. In that sense, we are in close and continuous contact with local communities of policymakers, academics and national stakeholders through ongoing research and consulting projects. In particular, IEPS Data was developed with inputs from a range of experts and policymakers, who have actively participated in workshops and are greatly engaged with IEPS’ activities.

IESP Conecta will be a built-in of IEPS Data and we need specifically: (i) financial support for the development of the application, and (ii) technical support and advice for the polishing of the community/network feature of the application – envisioned as something simpler but similar to Sinapse/Ki Community.