Analyzing Access to Health Facilities by Road Using Unconventional Data Sources

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an urgent need in emerging economies to quickly identify vulnerable populations that do not live within access of a health facility for testing and vaccination. This access information is critical to prioritize investments in mobile and temporary clinics. To meet this need, the World Bank team sought to develop an open-source methodology that could be quickly and easily implemented by government health departments, regardless of technical and data collection capacity. The team explored use of readily available open-source and licensable data, as well as non-intensive computational methodologies. By bringing together population data from Facebook’s Data for Good program, travel-time calculations from Mapbox, road network and point-of-interest data from the OpenStreetMap (OSM), and the World Bank’s open-source GOSTNets network routing tools, we created a computational framework that supports efficient and granular analysis of road-based access to health facilities in two pilot locations—Indonesia and the Philippines. Our findings align with observed health trends in these countries and support identification of high-density areas that lack sufficient road access to health facilities. Our framework is easy to replicate, allowing health officials and infrastructure planners to incorporate access analysis in pandemic response and future health access planning.