MEASURE Evaluation and USAID Zambia Develop Rapid Data Quality Assessments
March 6, 2018
MEASURE Evaluation
Data from Zambia’s health facilities must be of high quality for U.S. government funders and for the country’s policymakers to make sound decisions on health policy, health programs and the allocation of scarce resources. At the request of U.S. Agency for International Development in Zambia (USAID/Zambia) and with the benefit of expert guidance from the Mission, the USAID-funded MEASURE Evaluation project and USAID/Zambia developed and implemented an intensive and rapid set of activities and assessments focused on data quality.
Two data quality assessments (DQAs) were conducted in rapid order: a pilot in July 2017 and a follow up at 93 USAID-supported health facilities in Zambia in October 2017. Findings from the DQAs were used by the Mission to inform a comprehensive data quality intervention and a programmatic intervention to facilitate community follow-up and maximize reactivation on treatment of antiretroviral (ART) clients.
The DQAs found that facility data systems in Zambia are currently disparate and primarily paper-based (e.g., registers, pharmacy records, patient files, mobile clinic files), supplemented by a few electronic systems that cannot “talk to each other.” Ideally, it will eventually be possible to consolidate these systems and establish electronically interoperable ones that eliminate, or at least minimize, the need for duplication of effort and cross-transcribing of data across records. The goal of investments in data quality is to improve the health of the Zambian people.
Read more on the Measure Evaluation website.