Public assessment of health service quality
The solution we are envisioning follows the tripadvisor.com user rating model, and collects different types of statistical information about users, their health challenges (respecting privacy), their location, prices (official and illicit), travel times to hospitals, etc.
Problem/challenge: The problem we are trying to address is the lack of transparency about performance within the health sector service, particularly on the part of providers, and their limited accountability to patients. Hospital facilities are often overcrowded and under-resourced, combined with numerous challenges such as pervasive envelope payments, the need for many rural citizens to travel to big-city hospitals for care and others. One of the key problems is the lack of information that citizens have about the performance of providers and their capacity, prices, affordable lodging options etc.
Context: Vietnam’s internet penetration rate is currently 35%, but with significant differences between the cities and rural areas. There are currently more than 4 million broadband subscribers in Vietnam. Overall internet usage is growing fast but with differences between urban and rural areas. Mobile internet services appear to be increasingly used and affordable at least for young urban professionals. The broader sociopolitical context for this project is a broad acknowledgement of the challenges in the health sector by citizens and the government, and to some degree the health sector providers. The private health service market appears to be growing fast, adding to some of the challenges faced by the public sector. A number of management reforms are underway, including the use of private sector management principles in public facilities (which can add to pressure faced by health professionals) and the piloting of no envelope initiatives in individual hospitals. Overall, while the challenges are acknowledged, the underlying problems are complex and hard to address while specific issues such as corruption remain sensitive and need to be addressed as part of a broader attempt to increase transparency and accountability, along with increasing resources available to health sector providers.
Target audience and beneficiaries: The beneficiaries of 'toidibenhvien' are primarily the end users of health services (patients), but over time, we expect that health service providers will find the information useful for improving their services. In a first phase, urban, middle class users would be targeted, and incrementally, adequate services (such as SMS and offline extensions) would be added to reach rural users, too. We think that the primary audience could be women between 25 and 40 years of age, but not necessarily exclusively so.
