During the last months, DevSeed data team, as active members of the OSM community in Peru, along the support of other members of the community, imported around 7,933 health centers throughout Peru between health centers of different categories and from different operator institutions both public and private.

Once the importation was completed, about 6,200 new health centers were added to the map, and to those already existing on the map we added more details, such as; operator, telephone, address, category, among others. This was possible by the data found in the Peru’s National Open Data Portal, so, thanks to the open data, we were able to add new health centers to OSM and improve the map in Peru, especially in the rural areas where this type of information was poor and in many other areas they simply did not exist. But currently, after this importation, there are more than 8,600 health centers across Peru, in comparison to the 2,400 that were on the map.

The before and after of the importation - The yellow dots are the existing health centers before the importation, the turqouse dots are the new health centers added at the end of the import.

Recently, the Peru’s president declared the official name of the year 2020, as; “Year of the universalization of health”, that shows to the health as one of the government’s priorities, since it is a basic service in which each government must set its eyes to improve the population’s opportunities access to health services.

With this, we can have a detailed map of existing health centers in the country, to see where the institutions are located and have information that is available to the population and to the decision-making government institutions on health issues, in order to expand health services to the entire population, through the implementation of new health centers where there is not or the improvement of the existing ones.

The process of the data cleaning for the importation is documented in the health-centers-import repo and the wiki.