Collecting service data from Private Providers
Question:
How do you motivate the private sector to report data to the Government or other entities on the services they provide, the number of patients receiving treatment for various illnesses/accessing services, capacity, etc.? What if private providers are willing to provide this information, but the Government does not have the capacity to collect it?Answers
The private sector can really be motivated to report data to government or other entities. The following are essential conditions:
1. There must be feed-back from the recipient and percieved value from sender.
2. There is confidentiality between sender and recipient.
3. There is involvement of the private sector in designing the data forms or sets.
4. The government must show that it has the capacity to collate, analyse and report on the data.
5. Training and support materials can be linked to data submission.
6. In Nigeria, the HMOs operating the National Health Insurance Scheme encourage prompt payment of provider fee-for-service bills once supported with the requird data.
7. In Nigeria, the major problem has been in collecting data from public sector providers.
8. Governments in developing countries really do have a low capacity for managing data.
Answers
In my experience, the private sector is more likely to gather and report service statistics when (1) there is a perceived value for their business that compensates the cost and effort of collecting and reporting data; (2) the data from each individual clinic is not available to competitors or the general public; (3) Aggregated information is available and accessible in a timely manner; and (4) the data provided is not used for taxation purposes.
Data collection in itself should be a task carried out by private providers who send it to the Government. Private provider networks and franchises can assume the data processing task, including feed back to data owners, in case the Governement does not have this capacity. I don´t see any answer for those private providers that work in isolation.
Answers
There are some encouraging data reporting pilot projects but generally one has not come across robust data collection and validation systems for private sector in place. (Please correct, if I am wrong).
One good example is from Kenya where the Aga Khan Health Services, Community Health department has designed a Health Management Information system (HMIS) for the governement and tested this in two districts. The Kenya MoH has accepted this as a prototype for implementation nationwide.
In Pakistan the Greenstar social franchise reports FP/RH figures collected from private providers by the managing NGO (with incentives for providers for recording the data) this gets included in national reports as couple year protection(CYPs). I am sure there must be other examples and pockets of success in other countries.
