[Tagging] Feature Proposal - RFC - Tag:insurance:health

[Joseph Eisenberg]

5) insurance:health

The proposal suggests values of "no", "public", "private" and "unknown".

Most of these values are not very helpful in most countries.

"insurance:health=no" might be useful in the rare instance that a
private clinic or facility does not directly accept any form of health
insurance for payment, however this is rare.

"insurance:health=public" is not very specific. This might be
sufficient in a country where there is only one public,
government-administered insurance plan. However, here in Indonesia
there are 2 common public insurance plans in my province, so it would
be much more useful to use the name of the insurance as the value, eg
"insurance:health=BPJS" and "insurance:health=Papua_Sehat". In the USA
there is Medicare and various local versions of Medicaid in each
state, in addition to hmo-managed Medicare and Medicaid plans.

"insurance:health=private" is even less useful. I don't think this tag
is helpful at all, because each private insurance plan is different.
Similarly, "insurance:health=unknown" should not be used, because it
doesn't provide any information.

This suggests a problem for counties like the USA or Germany where
there are dozens or hundreds of health insurance companies with many
different health plans, each of which may be accepted by a different
list of physicians and health facilities. Would a USA hospital be
tagged with a list of 100 different insurance company and plan
combinations? This would be hard to manage and maintain by most
openstreetmap mappers.

-Joseph Eisenberg M.D.

On 6/20/19, Mhairi O'Hara <mhairi.ohara at hotosm.org> wrote:
> Hello Tagging Mailing List,
>
> We would like to bring your attention and comments on the proposal for the
> staff_count:doctors and staff_count:nurses tags, which helps identify the
> number of doctors and nurses at a given health facility [1][2]. The
> operational_status tag, which has been proposed before and I would like to
> highlight again, as this is used to document an observation of the current
> functional status of a mapped feature (i.e. health facility) [3]. The
> health_amenity:type tag is also being proposed, as this indicates what type
> of speciality medical equipment is available at the health facility [4] and
> the final tag is insurance:health which describes the type of health
> insurance accepted at a health facility [5].
>
> Some of these are already in use but have never been formally accepted, or
> properly described as to how they should be applied, which we would like to
> try and achieve if possible for the Healthsites.io project. Please take a
> look at the proposal pages on the OSM Wiki, as well as the Global
> Healthsites Mapping Project page [2] which is at the core of the recent
> work focused on creating a health facility data model. We look forward to
> discussing these proposals on the respective Wiki discussion pages.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Mhairi
>
> [1]
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Tag:staff_count:doctors
> [2]
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Tag:staff_count:nurses
> [3]
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Tag:operational_status
> [4]
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Tag:health_amenity:type
> [5]
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Tag:insurance:health
> [6]
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Global_Healthsites_Mapping_Project#Tag_Proposal
>
>
> --
> *Mhairi O'Hara*
> Project Manager
> mhairi.ohara at hotosm.org
> @mataharimhairi
>
>
> *Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team*
> *Using OpenStreetMap for Humanitarian Response & Economic Development*
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