TREAT Asia Launches Community-led Monitoring Dashboard

With support from ViiV Healthcare and the assistance of amfAR’s public policy team, amfAR’s TREAT Asia program has launched CLM Asia, an online data dashboard to enhance ongoing community-led monitoring in India and Indonesia.

Community-led monitoring or CLM is a practice that allows people living with or affected by HIV to provide immediate feedback on the quality of HIV service delivery, and aims to offer a more complete picture of HIV services from the perspectives of those who use them. Often working in teams, highly trained peer monitors (sometimes called enumerators) survey individuals about their experiences using HIV and related services, as well as their needs and priorities for future care. After collecting and analyzing qualitative and quantitative data, CLM teams work together with those who make HIV service-delivery decisions in local clinics and health departments to address issues. The CLM process can facilitate prioritization of social and humanitarian concerns that may be missed by other types of monitoring.

The dashboard is a central component of a three-year-old CLM project that was initiated by TREAT Asia and three partner organizations—the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition (ITPC) and two non-profit organizations focused on HIV and viral hepatitis-related advocacy and support, Community Network for Empowerment (CoNE), based in Manipur, India, and Yayasan Peduli Hati Bangsa, based near Jakarta, Indonesia. Similar to the amfAR policy office’s support of CLM program development in Haiti, Malawi, South Africa, Uganda and Zimbabwe, TREAT Asia provided technical input into developing the data indicators and collection tools, and training on data collection to national partners. Initially, the project gathered input from service users from multiple healthcare facilities to assess care services for HIV and hepatitis C around availability, accessibility, affordability, acceptability, and quality.

Giten Khwairakpam, TREAT Asia Program Manager, Community and Policy, who has been supervising the dashboard initiative as well as helping to train the peer monitors/enumerators, notes the dashboard allows for more efficient data collection via a software application uploaded to tablets: “It is a paperless data collection process that can be used even when there is no Internet connectivity. Once online, the data can be rapidly synchronized with the dashboard and shorten the time between identifying a service gap and addressing it.”

Detailed dashboard analyses, with easy to review graphs and data visualizations, can appear in real time and be easily shared.

“It is important that service users get the maximum amount of services with the highest quality…,” says Rajkumar Nalinikanta, president of CoNE. “The dashboard will help us simplify the data collection and interpretation processes, and better understand the quality of healthcare service provided so we can initiate immediate advocacy steps or communication with authorities to resolve barriers.”

Notes Caroline Thomas, founder of Yayasan Peduli Hati Bangsa: “Many individuals in underserved communities face barriers to accessing comprehensive services and other means needed in the management of their heath conditions. The dashboard can help foster a culture of data-driven decisions by policy makers and healthcare providers, thus significantly improving health outcomes and reducing transmission and mortality.”

Jennifer Sherwood, amfAR’s Public Policy Manager, shares another benefit of the tool: “You never know when an advocacy moment is going to arise—and when it does, we need to be ready. Having a CLM dashboard means that we can capitalize on these advocacy moments and respond to the issue with real-time data.”

Visit the CLM Asia Dashboard at https://data.clm-asia.org/.