Sahana Geo-Locate the Hospitals Challenge

In about 24 hours, my call for volunteers for this effort was answered in an overwhelming fashion. We started with 100 names of hospitals in Haiti that we knew existed, but did not have coordinates for - latitude and longitude - such that we could plot them on maps. For some, we had street addresses; others, maybe only the municipality in which it was located. With little instruction other than to think creatively, we have completed this task. At this hour, 3 remain… and I'm confident that someone will be able to track those down as well.

The solutions were creative: many news stories found online helped people to find the locations of the hospitals. In one case, someone followed the description of the hospital as being at the end of a road by the water, and tracing from a known location via a satellite view in google maps, they were able to identify the building compound where the hospital is located. Others were able to reconcile the listing with Open Street Map data, as I was hoping. Still others placed markers at the center of small villages as a best guess. While that is admittedly not the most accurate solution, and wouldn't suit for a large city such as Port au Prince, for small municipalities with a single hospital, it suits the purpose here - which is letting aid agencies and other responding agencies know that there is a hospital there - so assessment teams can make contact. Part of this project's goals is to push out assessment requests - and the first question to be asked is to get confirmation of the name, location and contact information for the hospitals. Then find out about damage, beds, staffing, needs, etc. Tracking and managing the requests for information and requests for assistance is the capacity that we hope to build from this data.

Well done. Thank you.

We have just finished giving the dataset a final scrub and are in the process of importing it into our http://haiti.sahanafoundation.org Sahana Haiti portal. As promised, we are sharing our data through publishing feeds through open standards. For Sahana's hospital management system, we are particularly proud to be providing an EDXL-HAVE feed and hope to work with other efforts on interoperability and common standards. We are going to be continuing to add to this dataset, working to reconcile duplicates, adding the temporary hospitals and offshore assets (such as hospital ships) that have been stood up since last week's earthquake, and working with other organizations on this collaborative project.

Our hospitals data feeds can be found at the following locations:
* EDXL-HAVE: http://haiti.sahanafoundation.org/prod/hms/hospital.have
* KML: http://haiti.sahanafoundation.org/prod/hms/hospital.kml
* GeoRSS: http://haiti.sahanafoundation.org/prod/hms/hospital.georss
* JSON: http://haiti.sahanafoundation.org/prod/hms/hospital.json
* XML: http://haiti.sahanafoundation.org/prod/hms/hospital.xml
* CSV: http://haiti.sahanafoundation.org/prod/hms/hospital.csv
* GPX: http://haiti.sahanafoundation.org/prod/hms/hospital.gpx
* XLS: if you must

We are collecting the best available dataset of the names and locations of hospitals in Haiti. We have compiled many sources of this information and have already inputted them into our main Sahana registry on our Haiti response portal. Sources of our data includes a list from the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) via UN OCHA that has geolocations of 57 of 157 listed hospitals, 82 hospitals from Open Street Maps, and 43 hospitals painstakingly scraped from RELIEFWEB data by Sahana volunteers last weekend.

The challenge is simple: we need volunteers to use the power of their minds and the internet to find the latitude and longitude of the remaining 100 hospitals listed on PAHO's list. This will provide the relief effort will the best and most comprehensive data layer available on health facilities in the country.

Important applications will be built on this dataset - including a system to monitor available beds, the need for supplies and medical staff - which will allow the relief agencies to better manage medical services for the survivors of the earthquake. These systems do not work if they do not know where the hospitals are/were located. Having this information will allow responders to systematically survey the needs and capabilities of these facilities and help save lives.

This challenge is very important.

Instructions are simple and few:

• The spreadsheet with the hospitals that we need to geo-locate is located here. Open the link.
• Columns F & G contain the missing elements - longitude and latitude - they should be shaded red when empty, green when completed correctly.
• Start with the first hospital missing geo-location information - and try to track down the missing information by any means necessary (see suggestions below)
• Enter longitude and latitude in degree decimals. Longitudes will be negative, e.g. -70.69630; Latitudes will positive, e.g. 19.454878
• Five decimal places should be sufficient for accuracy. More than six is totally unnecessary.

• Use your brain - be creative.
• Many of these should be simple - lookup name on Google Earth - might be able to resolve most of them
• Check Open Street Maps - about 20-30 of their known hospitals may be on the missing list. (we'll be removing ones from the list as we reconcile the two lists).
• Use address information to look up on mapping sites (google, microsoft, yahoo, etc.)
• In some cases, a local number for the hospital is recorded - as a last resort, try to call/skype the number and see if you can reach them directly. If they do not know the GPS coordinates, they might be able to give you location information sufficient to find it on a map.
• Search for the name of the hospital online
• Use your networks but please don't spam through mass emailings.
• Add tips on what is working and what is not on the tab provided in the spreadsheet for others who follow.

Thank you. Your help is desperately needed.

Go forth and do good.