About
Facility Match is a tool for identifying, reconciling, and synthesizing duplicate or incomplete facility records across multiple data sets.
Facility Match began in the health sector as a way to automate the process of cleaning up disparate data sets so ministries of health could create and maintain master lists of all the health facilities in their countries. But officials in any sector with a need to maintain an accurate list of facilities can use the tool.
How it works
Data points such as the name and location of health facilities are essential to health information systems, reports, and decision-making. However, up-to-date, accurate information on facilities may be difficult to find as different stakeholders with different information needs and naming conventions maintain separate lists.
For example, a district health office may maintain a list that includes all the public health facilities in its geographic area. A medical council may maintain a list of all the physicians it has licensed in the country, including the provider’s current district and post, whether it's a private, public, faith-based, or NGO-managed facility. These two lists together may provide valuable, expanded information about health service coverage in the district but lack a consistent unique identifier or naming convention for each facility. Reconciling data from these two lists was previously a manual and time-consuming process. Facility Match changes that.
Facility Match can speed up and improve the accuracy of developing and maintaining canonical lists of facilities for information systems and applications. Whether it's a registry of schools, farms, health clinics, or something else, Facility Match can save technologists and officials time and ensure more accurate data.
History
IntraHealth International originally developed Facility Match through its role on DATIM, a PEPFAR funded Project. This project developed tools to identify and synthesize duplicate health facility records across multiple sources of data.
IntraHealth received additional funding from Digital Square, a PATH-led initiative funded and designed by the United States Agency for International Development, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and a consortium of other investors, in support of the Global Open Facility Registry (GOFR).
Facility Match is now available as a standalone tool to help officials and technologists across sectors reconcile facility data originating from multiple sources.
More information
You can demo Facility Match here. For more information, please contact IntraHealth International’s Digital Health team at digitalhealth@intrahealth.org.
All banner photographs on the Facility Match website are by Will Boase and Tommy Trenchard for IntraHealth International.