Open health metrics in Colombia

Colombia is perceived as a corrupt country by different rankings that, on different spectrums, place Colombia between the most corrupt countries in the world and- to the very least- one with a serious problem of corruption. Public Management in Colombia, therefore, turns into one area of key importance to solve this issue. 

One of the key challenges to solving this issue is the integrity of data and use thereof to bring about insights on govt indicators. The government is not conclusive with its data, it usually is tampered with to provide good figures to the public opinion, it also comes with a lack of treatment since the data collected lacks value to both public servants and citizens. True insights on data are needed through data scientist approach, however, this could not be efficiently executed unless the data to be analysed is reliable.

The project consists of two moments:

Pilot project on health record through metadata: the undertaking will provide a first glance at the use of blockchain for record-keeping, the health metadata, initially a few sets of information on covid deaths and number of people without health insurance (subject to change since it will be the secretary of health which will determine at the time of execution what data is more suitable for trial). Once the transaction metadata is proved to be effective to store information in a decentralised manner, the secretary of health will open up to more data sets on other variables usually stored on centralised databases.

Open metrics with value in smart contracts: the team will provide a solution to the problem of data without value (insights). Reports from CEPAL and OECD have stressed the need for developing countries to develop better data management; one of these problems is data without value: governments are storing tumultuous amounts of data without creating any value to either the population or policy makers. Alongside with the problem of tampered data, this makes the problem of subjective policy making where policy-makers cannot truly understand the population they are impact, as well as the problem of the population engaging into the process becoming active authors of their own policies.

As the pilot project turns successful (within six moths having started the project), the amount of data will be significant enought to start criss-crossing data sets (stored through metadata) with other government databases (not necessarily stored on the blockchain since they would belong to other departments in the government) through a smart contract designed to pull out those insights unexistent up to this date.

Solving real world problems: as transaction metada is the first step to ensure traceability of data, as well the integrity thereof, the project will give the cardano blockchain enough exposure to both the government and citizens as it would be the first attempt to bring about this technology into action in Colombia. As the information will be public, citizens will be able to use it to create databases of their own, as well as Dapps and DAOs; public servants will be able to further develop governments applications making use of smart contracts and other services regarding digital identity (PRISM) and land registries as the blockchain becomes known. This project intends to be a pioneer for the country, showing the potential to solve developing countries' problems, as it is already doing in Africa and paving the ground for future partnerships with the colombian government.

Definition of success: the success is determined upon a 12-month timeframe. 1) the first six months are going to be solely dedicated to selecting alongside the Secretary of Health the datasets that are goint to be used for the pilot project, upbringing such data onto the blockchain through transaction metadata, and adding further data sets once the ones selected for the project pilot are fully integrated into the blockchain. It will be considered not successful if the data sets posed at the beginning of the project are unable to be ready by the end of the first six months; 2) the next six months are going to be dedicated to the multidisciplinary effort of policy-makers, data analysts and community to understand those insights or relationships that can be drawn out of the metadata, e.g., correlation between number of people without health insurance and unemployment figures, etc. For this, the six-month lapse shall be considered a success if we have effectively integrated other government databases (or datasets not necessarily stored on the blockchain) with the metadata collected on health records (on the blockchain) to draw new indicators and insights to the public and public policies.

Budget requirements: the project will count with the support of Universidad Santo Tomás (to which two of the project leads are associates, one as a professor and the other as an active member of the observatory in territorial public policies), allowing us to reduce costs in terms of research of the communities impacted, social dynamics, and data analysis since human resource is going to be provided to a certain extent by enthusiasts on the blockchain. 

The costs are also going to be reduced as the project starts running, the expansion to other areas of the public administration, as well as the extent to which data is going to be used are going to be supported by the public sector.

Most costs are going to be for the engineer lead and team of developers. As the Colombian Peso is heavily devalued, 1,000 dollars account for over 5 minimum wages. The project would require 12,000 dollars to cover the cost of the computer scientists involved in the process- one of whom is the third project lead.