Charitable giving for health: Who benefits From New Zealand's Givealittle crowdfunding platform

Crowdfunding for health has become an increasingly popular way to finance healthcare expenses. Crowdfunding is a means to address gaps in coverage and limitations in social welfare systems. There are numerous crowdfunding web-based platforms globally, where patients, caregivers or friends request donations to support and fund a range of unmet needs: from experimental therapies abroad to lost income and wages due to incapacity. Previous research has considered the risks and benefits of crowdfunding medical expenses, including that it may exacerbate inequities. Much of the literature focuses on cross-sectional analysis. Exploiting new methods of collating publicly available data and text mining, this paper seeks to understand crowdfunding of health in a country with universal health coverage but a system with growing inequities over time.We explore the unmet health need in aotearoa new zealand using machine learning techniques to exploit publicly available data on charitable requests. Not only does it offer insights with respect to what needs are unmet and which campaigns are most successful, it also offers at example of the application of machine learning techniques to health economic issues.The code and data are open source at https://github.com/uoa-eresearch/givealittleABOUT THE AUTHORNick Young is a research software engineer at the Centre for eResearch at the University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau. He has experience in data analytics, visualisation and algorithms, using tools such as Blender, Unity and Python. Nick has created visualisations for researchers from a variety of science domains, such as a map of humpback whale migration, a map of aid flows into the Pacific, and an immersive vr experience of the energy density of the early universe. -----For more information about the eResearch NZ / eRangahau Aotearoa conference, visit: https://eresearchnz.co.nz/