7. Improving Access to Health Services in Mongolia via Open Data During and Beyond the COVID-19 Pandemic

The Cities COVID Mitigation and Mapping (C2M2) Ulaanbaatar project was implemented to mitigate the secondary health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic by facilitating access to health services, via making information about health services available and easily accessible to the public. The project started in October 2020 when Mongolia still had not reported any case of community outbreak of the COVID-19 virus. The WHO and the international media praised and exemplified Mongolia’s efforts in containing the virus, thanks to swift and strict measures to close its borders, suspend local travel, and enforce lock down measures – that is until November of 2020. Almost a year later, Mongolia has one of the worst daily COVID-19 cases, hospitalization rates, and deaths despite close to 70% vaccination rate. The full swing of the pandemic put an immense pressure on the health infrastructure evidenced by the lack of non-COVID-19-related health services and national shortage of health workers. The pre-pandemic challenge of accessing healthcare has primarily been due to lack of reliable information about available health services and limited word of mouth. Our efforts focused on creating an up-to-date health service information portal to facilitate the process of finding information about the needed health services online easily, especially during lock-down measures. The project also worked to promote the use of geospatial data to support policy and decision-making by creating and sharing open data and developing a vulnerability analysis of urban and health service access. While the project has been successful in collecting data and creating the key tools, stakeholder and public outreach remains a key step in achieving the intended results.