Health Data Access, Sharing, and Use Generic Guidelines

Introduction

This Health Data Access, Sharing, and Use Guidelines Development Toolkit was developed under the Technical Assistance Platform to support countries to strengthen the environment for health data access, sharing, and use, and to promote institutional data access, sharing, and use that are consistent with national laws and policies. This toolkit has three components:

1. The Health Data Access, Sharing, and Use Generic Guidelines
2. The Health Data Access, Sharing, and Use Guidelines Implementation Framework
3. The Health Data Access, Sharing, and Use Guidelines Implementation Assessment Plan

Toolkit Components

Generic Guidelines

The first component of the Toolkit provides generic health data access, sharing, and use policy guidelines. These policy guidelines are not intended to be adopted as-is, but rather apply to the Implementation Framework of the Toolkit to ensure the contextualization of the generic policy in a country context. The generic policy includes a few key questions at the beginning or end of each section for considerations by stakeholders during the implementation phase.

Guidelines Implementation Framework

This implementation framework is intended to guide the implementation of the Generic Guidelines, which serves as a template for countries to develop a health data access, sharing, and use guideline or to modify an existing policy/guideline.

This implementation framework is applicable:

1. If a country/project does not have existing health data access, sharing, and use guidelines and identified a need to develop one.
2. When a country/project has an existing health data sharing guideline and has identified a need for policy refinement/customization/adaptation.
3. When conducting monitoring and evaluation/assessment of guideline implementation process.

Guidelines Implementation Assessment Plan

The purpose of this assessment plan is to:

1. Measure if the Data Access, Sharing, and Use Guidelines were implemented as intended
2. Identify barriers to and facilitators of Guideline implementation
3. Determine if the Guidelines are feasible or have unintended negative consequences
4. Determine if the Guidelines are being complied with
5. Inform development of an action plan to overcome the barriers to implementation
6. Enable comparison between different phases and levels of Guideline implementation