Access to care: analysis of the geographical distribution of healthcare using Linked Open Data
This work addresses the problem of fragmented medical facility data for patients, healthcare professionals, companies, regulatory authorities, and researchers, though it appears incremental in nature.
The researchers tackled the problem of limited public access to comprehensive data on medical facility locations by creating a worldwide semantic dataset through collecting, aligning, and linking various open-source databases. They evaluated data sources on dimensions like completeness and correctness, providing stakeholders with better overview of healthcare access and distribution.
Background: Access to medical care is strongly dependent on resource allocation, such as the geographical distribution of medical facilities. Nevertheless, this data is usually restricted to country official documentation, not available to the public. While some medical facilities' data is accessible as semantic resources on the Web, it is not consistent in its modeling and has yet to be integrated into a complete, open, and specialized repository. This work focuses on generating a comprehensive semantic dataset of medical facilities worldwide containing extensive information about such facilities' geo-location. Results: For this purpose, we collect, align, and link various open-source databases where medical facilities' information may be present. This work allows us to evaluate each data source along various dimensions, such as completeness, correctness, and interlinking with other sources, all critical aspects of current knowledge representation technologies. Conclusions: Our contributions directly benefit stakeholders in the biomedical and health domain (patients, healthcare professionals, companies, regulatory authorities, and researchers), who will now have a better overview of the access to and distribution of medical facilities.