MIS framework on open government data for local government units in maternal health and child care in the Philippines

• Main Author: Ching, Michelle Renee Domingo
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2015
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_masteral/4822
• Institution: De La Salle University

The Millennium Development Goals (MDG) of the Philippines consists of 3 goals pertaining to health, and 2 of which are directly pointing to Maternal Health and Child Care (MHCC) and 1 for other diseases such as Tuberculosis (TB). It has always been a struggle for the Philippine government to improve the maternal and child mortality rates, however it still continuous to increase regardless of its efforts on increasing the public health budget and the devolution of public health to the local communities. Based on the literatures, this is due to the inefficient and ineffective health and management information system that are due to information gaps and underutilization of data in MHCC based on the respective studies of Pons and Schwefel, Jayasuriya, and Marcelo et al. and according to United Nations (UN), the Top-Down Approach of the Philippine government on devising public health programs. Moreover, Local Government Units (LGUs) were not ready and capable when the public health services were devolved to them, which caused difficulty in determining the demand side of the community. However, there are vast datasets in MHCC that can be utilized for efficient and effective monitoring and planning that will be able to discern both the supply and demand sides of the government and the community, respectively. Having these, it gives an opportunity for Open Data (OD) to harness these datasets for better planning and delivery of public health with an intermediary / infomediary that will be able to gather and organize the large amounts of government-produced data and supply the information to the public. Since OD concept makes use of an intermediary / infomediary, this research study looks at the LGUs as the possible intermediary / infomediary because of its role in public health and it has the proper resources such as public health budget, ground-level manpower, and MHCC datasets from Barangay Health Stations (BHS). Having said that, the framework that this research study provides will be able to help the LGUs on the OD interventions of the government. This framework is an MIS Framework on Open Government Data (OGD) for LGUs in MHCC in the Philippines focusing on the content, infrastructure, and application. Furthermore, this research study promotes further research on validating the results through its replication in different localities in the Philippines. It also encourages researchers to expand the research study to be able to cover the other 2 ICT4D framework of Roger Harris elements, which are the Policy and the Human Capacity. Lastly, aside from MHCC, areas of study such as education, disaster risk reduction, and agriculture may be looked at on how OD will be able to utilize and maximize the datasets available in those study areas.