Essential health services tracker to enhance routine data use for sector‐wide decision‐making

Healthcare actors have designated a set of services as essential health services (EHSs), essential for achieving universal health coverage. Therefore, monitoring the provision of EHS is indispensable to gauge how countries progress toward achieving universal health coverage. However, there are no mechanisms for sector‐wide monitoring of these services. While EHSs cover the entire health sector, monitoring is left to individual subunits and health programs, which often confine themselves to specific diseases and health interventions. This makes it difficult to monitor interferences to the provision of these services. Such interferences include epidemics and pandemics such as COVID‐19, Marburg, Ebola, and seasonal incidences of cholera. This study, therefore, proposes an EHS tracker, a data visualization tool, to enhance routine data use for monitoring and tracking EHSs regularly. The paper details a collaborative process for developing the tracker, culminating in the creation of the tool itself. The paper contributes to the ongoing initiatives to strengthen data use practices using innovative solutions in the efforts to institutionalize data use practices and data‐driven decision‐making for improved healthcare service delivery.