Cross Cutting Areas

Monitoring & Evaluation

CAMRIS International provides monitoring and evaluation (M&E) services with the goal of enabling the design and implementation of systems that generate quality data and then use this data to improve program planning and decision making. Our services improve their performance ? by establishing evidence-based policy-making and budget decision-making, evidence-based management, and evidence-based accountability.
For the M&E evaluation for the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) CAMRIS International evaluated 15 projects in the WB/IMSS purview including health insurance decentralization (Decentralized Medical Areas), financing, contract enforcement, and coverage registry; technology and investment policy, hospital case mix reporting, family practice model, workforce management and incentives.

Capacity Building

CAMRIS provides highly customized support to organizations from the NGO, corporate, and governmental sectors. Especially important is our ability to combine technical work in public health with management development tailored to local needs and capacities. We work with government and NGOs so that they can become effective in their work and sustainable; we work with healthcare providers to improve quality and effectiveness.

Our work on NGO strengthening spans decades, and includes direct services to dozens of NGOs. These have included major international NGOs, such as CARE International, as well as local community groups such as the Fundacion Pablo Jaramillo and ASME-X in Ecuador and the Fundacion del Ojo in Colombia. Fundacion Pablo Jaramillo in Cuenca in the south of Ecuador was able to improve its cost recovery while also increasing targeted services and this platform was leveraged into a service delivery contract with the national health care system under a World Bank funded project. As a result, a large population was transformed from a local, heavily subsidized NGO to a major regional provider with targeted, high-quality basic services, increased capacity, and enhanced sustainability.

For the APOLO project in Ecuador, a USAID-funded project to develop a group of community-based health service NGOs, CAMRIS created successful health provider systems through local NGO channels and clinics, to improve women and children’s accesibility to quality and affordable health care. Support to this project included strategic planning implementation of technical assistance in management and finance; design and implementation of a cost-plus pricing system to strengthen the financial stability of major non-governmental service providers; design of local service delivery networks and a local franchising network, design and implementation of a membership plan to expand coverage and organize demand for basic services; support for the design and development of information systems and a monitoring and evaluation system.

Knowledge Management

CAMRIS has been providing technical services to improve knowledge management capacity within organizations that have set as their goal: fostering an environment conducive to more effective knowledge synthesis, transfer, and use. Our Knowledge Management services help our clients to organize and manage strategic and operational knowledge that is built from reliable information which is in turn built on verifiable data. This solid evidence based approach gives managers and decisions makers the best possible basis for using their program resources for maximum impact. Our current work emphasizes knowledge management in the health and economic development sectors. Relevance of KM The practice of utilizing, sharing, and using intellectual capital (data, information, knowledge) to gain competitive advantage refers to
knowledge management. In short, the process by which data is transformed into knowledge. Effective knowledge management can also improve efficiency and innovation, and enable faster and more effective decision-making. It is said that the KM discipline is its "third stage" in which the awareness of the importance of the content and especially of the importance of the retrievability, and therefore of the arrangement, description and structure of the content.      The perspective of knowledge management can be focused on: a) The processes of organizational learning, b) The knowledge creation process, and c) Management based description. Furthermore, some of the KM models focus on a personalization strategy, whereas other focus on the codification of knowledge. The evaluation of existing knowledge includes the definition of knowledge objectives. Based on those objectives, decisions have to be drawn which information is important, missing or no longer of relevance, this is the basis of an information audit. CAMRIS has carried out Information Audits as systematic reviews, classification, rating and organization of available information to establish availability, reliability and gaps.
Knowledge management systems are used by our clients to: Utilize results frameworks to achieve international health and economic agendas in order to define common goals and improve communication with regard to development project planning, implementation, and reporting; Support international health and economic agendas that improve multilateral coordination at the national and international levels and therefore require complex methodological alignments in addressing global development challenges; Involve all stakeholders in knowledge-intensive projects, to include the design of health and economic policy and reform agendas; modernization and customization of public health and economic development strategies; development of technical assistance planning and evaluative frameworks; and design of methodological tools for governmental, non-governmental and multilateral organizations and partnerships.		"Knowledge management (KM) is the process of creating value for the intangible assets of an enterprise." p. 37 Konstantinos Ergazakis, Konstantinos Karnezis, et al. (2002). Knowledge Management in Enterprises: A Research Agenda. Practical aspects of Knowledge Management - 4th International Conference, PAKM 2002, Vienna, Austria, Springer. By 2002, a Price Waterhouse survey carried out with 150 top executives in 96 leading companies (83% US, 14% Europe, 3% Asia/Pacific) showed that 82% of surveyed companies said that they were involved in KM activities. "One of the limiting requirements for the information handling processes is no longer the storage capacity in databases but the time required for information search and analysis. The discrimination of relevant and irrelevant information is one of the crucial points in information storage and retrieval" p. 16
Within these areas, we work to: Develop on- and off-line tools (open-source and other) for information search, systematization, and dissemination; Facilitate knowledge synthesis by identifying existing tools and techniques and adapting them to the international health agenda while developing innovative Web-based knowledge management tools; Populate knowledge management systems to address client needs; Develop user-focused decision support interfaces. KM Tools/Products The four main KM tools and associated products we use are: 1) Knowledge Maps, 2) Data Mining, 3) Digital Libraries and 4) Information Audits. All of these are geared towards improving the decision-making process within organizations. Knowledge Maps Visual representation such as a Knowledge Map and structuring of knowledge makes access to "information about knowledge" much easier to analyze. Compared to hierarchically structure information a two dimensional knowledge gives much better overview over the existing or selected information. Data Mining Data mining is a capability within the business intelligence system (BIS) of an organization's information system architecture. The purpose of the BIS is to support decision-making through the analysis of data consolidated together from sources, which are either outside the organization or from internal transaction processing systems (TPS). Digital Libraries A Digital Library provides an open-source searchable tool with which users can access information sources gathered in the Information Audit. The Digital Library is full-text searchable across formats, be they datasets, .pdf files, images, word or text files, spreadsheets, video clips, wav files or other formats. Information Audit CAMRIS has carried out Information Audits as systematic reviews, classification, rating and organization of available information to establish availability, reliability and gaps.