Health care priorities

: exploring health care priority differentials between urban and rural low : incomes regions through crowdsourcing

Abstract

Crowdsourcing is becoming more and more powerful in the online community for centralized knowledge, distributed work and micro-tasking. Project Antares, with the Antares Matrix, emerges as a potential tool for decision-makers around the world to make more informed and accurate decisions in regards to health care policies. This study, based on Project Antares and a research design proposed by Professor Villarroel, uses a crowdsourcing platform, Amazon Mechanical Turk, to assess the differentials between urban and rural populations in low-income regions, namely in what concerns their care about health, their access to health care and how they prioritize five disease dimensions identified by Project Antares. Through the data collected, we determine the differentials in the real needs and priorities as well as in the care and access to health care of these two different groups and conclude about the need to shorten the gap between the supply and demand of health care services in their region. The study presents crowdsourcing as the future tool to fill the gap between the demand and supply of health care services in low-income regions by providing decision-makers specific, live and updated information on health care.

Date of Award	14 Feb 2014
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Juan Andrei Villarroel Fernandéz (Supervisor)