Leveraging national health surveillance data and Microsoft PowerBI to deliver high quality reporting in the midst of a refugee crisis.
Monitoring Refugee Access to Care for WHO Romania
Client: WHO Romania
Project size: $25 000
Timeline: 2022
The World Health Organisation (WHO) employs people at a national, regional and global level to support its work towards enabling the highest possible levels of health for all.
Fjelltopp has worked with the WHO at all three levels, but for this project we were specifically supporting their Romania office, which is part of the WHO Europe region. We joined their team in the midst of the Ukrainian refugee crisis, as they sought to support the Ministry of Health in co-ordinating healthcare for the significant number of Ukrainian refugees crossing Romania’s borders.
We worked under the supervision of Dr John Haskew and Dr Caroline Clarinval (the WHO representative to Romania), bringing expertise and best practises in mapping data sources as well as building data visualisations and dashboards with PowerBI.
Context
On 24 February 2022, starting in the early morning and continuing throughout the day, Ukraine saw an unprecedented deterioration of its security situation extending well beyond the previous conflict-affected areas of Donetsk and Luhansk. The incident was declared a G3 Regional Emergency, the highest grade of WHO emergency, thereby allowing the organisation to mobilise resources across all levels.
Romania shares a border with Ukraine and has consequently seen a significant influx of refugees since the incident occurred. According to national guidance in Romania, Ukrainian refugees are offered a basic package of healthcare services for free. These services include consultation, prescription, and referral for prevention and treatment. They are provided by family and specialist doctors in outpatient and hospital settings.
It was important to understand how refugees accessed national healthcare services across the country when making decisions concerning how best to improve and sustain that care.
Solutions
- Fjelltopp worked with the Ministry of Health (MoH), the National Health Insurance House (NHIH), and UNHCR country office to identify and assemble relevant national-level data sources.
- Using the data, Fjelltopp designed and built a short report using PowerBI for distribution amongst key stakeholders on a monthly basis.
- The report ingested Microsoft Excel data in the format that it was shared between the NHIH and MoH. PowerBI was used to perform all further transformations, aggregations and visualisations.
- Detailed documentation was provided detailing how to update the PowerBI report on a monthly basis.
- Based on this project, we were also able to make recommendations to WHO national and regional offices regarding health management information in Romania.
Results
- A professional, informational, visually appealing and WHO-branded PowerBI dashboard, hosted online, and easily exported to an A4 PDF printout.
- A simple Excel-based data structure that can be managed and updated monthly by local staff.
- Available data sources and procedures to access them were mapped in collaboration with national level institutions.
- All data transformations between source and visualisation have been automated and recorded in PowerBI.
- Complete documentation showing country-office staff how to collect the necessary data and update the dashboard on a monthly basis.
What our client said about us
“Fjelltopp is a pleasure to work with, demonstrating responsiveness, flexibility and an ability to work with a range of different partners in-country. All this allowed us to develop tools that were timely, relevant and adapted to the local context in Romania. We would be happy to work with them again and to recommend their expertise to others.”
Dr John Haskew, Emergency Management Expert, WHO Romania
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