An Online Platform to Connect Hospitals with Volunteers and Donors
The Transformational Impact Rating System (TIRS) is designed to help high-impact hospitals in low-resource settings receive the resources needed to realize their full impact potential. Developed by a team of Wharton Global Health Volunteers in collaboration with Makunda Hospital in spring of 2020, the impact rating system is open to all legally registered hospitals.
In the neediest parts of the world, many hospitals face basic challenges such as lack of funding, running water, and electricity. Nevertheless, these hospitals often provide essential, life-saving services to their local communities. However, resources from government entities are often insufficient, and attracting the interest of donors and volunteers can be challenging and time-consuming. In the face of growing demand for their services, severe local constraints, and few patients who can pay for services, these vital hospitals may collapse for lack of external support as funding and volunteer resources dry up. When these hospitals cease to exist, the impact to the local communities they serve can be substantial. The goal of TIRS is to facilitate the connection between hospitals in low-resource areas with the financial and human resources that are critical to their survival.
Using TIRS, donors and volunteers can find hospitals with high impact potential where their donations and time will make the greatest difference – even if these organizations are too small to be evaluated by the major charity rating sites. By establishing a rating system that scores hospitals on common variables related to regional impact potential, financial health, operational performance, external relations, and volunteer experience, we hope to make it easier for donors and volunteers to identify and support hospitals that meet their interests and provide the most benefit for their time and donations.
Furthermore, hospitals can use detailed information from their scores to identify areas in which they are performing well relative to their peers, and work on areas for improvement in order to increase their scores over time.
We hope that TIRS will help connect small non-profit hospitals with appropriate resources to improve the lives of those who need their services most around the world. A full report on the development of TIRS can be found here. Excel version of the platform can be found here.
To obtain a TIRS impact score, each hospital must create a profile and input information for several variables across five categories: regional impact potential, financial health, operational performance, external relations, and volunteer experience. The variables include both quantitative and qualitative factors. A hospital’s impact score also incorporates survey data from donors, volunteers, staff, patients, and the local community, and publicly available information.
Once all data has been collected for a hospital, the hospital receives an overall impact score from 1 to 5, where 5 represents a hospital with high impact potential. This score is simply a weighted average of each variable’s rating from 1 to 5. (Details on the variable weights can be found in the full report.) The hospital also receives a score for each of the five categories. Similarly, these category scores are simple weighted averages of the ratings of the variables that fall within the category. (In other words, specific categories are not given additional weight; the importance of the category was already considered when weighting individual variables.) Variables for which no data is available receive a score of zero to encourage future collection of these data.
Currently, given the resources available, the data upon which a hospital’s TIRS score is based are largely self-reported. Although there is some accuracy risk with self-reported data, we do not want to prohibit hospitals from participating who could not afford an audit by a third party, given the low-resource setting. In the future, third party verification of hospitals’ data may be implemented to improve score reliability. Should on-site verification be implemented, hospitals whose information has been verified by a third party would be distinguished from those whose information has not yet been verified.
We understand that hospitals may want to protect the privacy of the data they provide to obtain a TIRS score. Therefore, we provide hospitals with the option to choose the level of data they share publicly. While the overall impact score and the regional impact potential category score (based on local factors) will be public, hospitals can opt out of sharing scores for the other categories and subcategories.
However, hospitals who choose to hide certain data bear the risk of losing the trust of donors and volunteers searching for hospitals to support. We encourage hospitals to carefully consider the balance between protecting privacy and engendering trust through transparency. We sincerely hope that all users will be able to benefit from the use of TIRS.
Those seeking to donate funds are advised to review the tax donation laws in your country.
Those seeking to volunteer are advised to review the visa requirements of the destination country.
We do not solicit contributions from the hospitals that are rated on our site to ensure that our ratings system remains objective. Furthermore, we do not charge users for the use of our ratings.
Neither the administrator of this website, nor Makunda Hospital, nor Wharton Global Health Volunteers are liable for any decisions made to donate time or funds due to the data provided on this site.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out to us by emailing us.