Evaluating Concordance Between Government Administrative Data and Externally Collected Data Among High Volume Government Health Facilities in Uttar Pradesh, India

Beth Phillips , University of California, San Francisco
Shreya Singhal, Community Empowerment Lab
Fnu Kajal, Government of India, Ministry of Health, Uttar Pradesh
Shambhavi Mishra, Community Empowerment Lab
Sun Yu Cotter, University of California, San Francisco
May Sudhinaraset, University of California, Los Angeles

Opportunities to validate government reports through external audits are rare, notably in India. A recently completed cross-sectional maternal health study by our team in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, involved review and use of government administrative data and externally collected data on health service indicators. This paper presents comparative analyses of the two datasets to test for concordance among the same maternal health quality indicators. The study findings indicate concordance between most indicators across government self-reported and externally collected data. When stratified by facility level or service type, results suggest significant over-reporting in the government administrative data on indicators that are incentivized. This is consistent across all levels of care; however, the most significant disparities appear at higher-level facilities, namely District Hospitals. This study has a number of important programmatic and policy implications. Government administrative data has the potential to be highly critical in informing large-scale quality improvements.

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 Presented in Session 20. Methods for Evaluating Population Programs