Croakey Posts A Fascinating Article On How To Make The Absolute Most Of The Health Data You Have!

This appeared last week:

Using the data revolution to agitate for health policy

Editor: Dr Ruth Armstrong Author: Alan Lopez on: September 15, 2017 In: global health, health inequalities, public health, rural and remote health

A themed edition of The Lancet, published today, marks the 20^th anniversary of the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study, and presents the findings for 2016.

Over the years, you will have seen much of the output of this study, which is the world’s largest scientific collaboration on population health, currently including data from more than 130 countries and territories.

The study tracks life expectancy and mortality, causes of death, overall disease burden, years lived with disability and risk factors that lead to health loss, allowing global and national health bodies to focus their efforts in the right directions.

But it can’t track data that is not collected.

In the post below, one of the founders of the GBD study, Laureate Professor Alan Lopez AC explains how innovative thinking and information technology, along with simple footwork, are filling the data gap in countries that have lacked the resources to collect health statistics.

It’s an exciting initiative that we know from experience, will ultimately lead to better policy, more accountability and improved health.

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Laureate Professor Alan Lopez AC writes:  

 It’s 2017 and we’re amid a Data Revolution. Wearable technology tells us everything we’ve ever wished to know. In the age of data, we believe that the more information our fitness tracker gives us, the more we know about our health, and what we can do to improve it.

What if I told you that many nations around the world don’t have the population health data equivalent of fitness tracker? How can countries that lack basic data about births and deaths formulate plans for improvement?

The health data drought in low and middle-income countries.

Around half of deaths worldwide are uncounted (around 25 million each year). And of those that are counted, many don’t have a cause of death logged.

Many records do not provide medically accurate or specific information. Without this information, government officials, public health leaders and donors cannot make informed decisions on priorities, including how and where to direct public health resources.

To give you a real example of the repercussions of the lack of death data we have around the world, take Myanmar.

There are about 450,000 deaths that occur each year in Myanmar, but of these about 80 per cent occur outside urban areas and outside of medical facilities. Each year, 250,000 deaths are simply registered with little or no information on what caused or contributed to them.

Based on the limited data available from these records, malaria could either be the single leading cause of death in Myanmar, or possibly the 17th biggest killer. Similarly, heart disease may be Myanmar’s second biggest killer but it may also be its 20th biggest, while asthma may be its 6th biggest killer but it may also be its 15th. We simply don’t know.

 Changing the way we see population health

Twenty-five years ago, Christopher Murray and I co-founded the Global Burden of Disease Study  – to provide the sort of evidence policy makers need to guide the way health dollars were spent.

The singular focus in global health spending for decades had been on infant and maternal death but, using the most comprehensive dataset worldwide to measure the world’s health problems, we argued that it was just as important to acknowledge that adults were dying prematurely in similar, if not greater, proportions to infants and their mothers.

Data told us this, and luckily governments took notice.

Now, governments such as the Australian Government can monitor the trends in previously ignored areas such as mental health and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health, and use the data to inform their efforts to reduce the burden of disease.

Twenty years later, I am still working to help countries improve their health data, and to agitate for policy change using innovative methods to collect data in some of the world’s hard-to-reach areas. And technology is now bridging the gap.

The Data for Health Initiative

Through the Bloomberg Philanthropies Data for Health Initiative I’m leading at the University of Melbourne, in partnership with other grantee organisations, we are using innovative technological interventions to bolster the civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) systems in 20 middle-and-low income countries, to make over one billion people count.

This is important, because the availability and use of such data has seen a huge change in increasing the quality and length of human lives.

Ecological analyses show that CRVS performance corresponds with good health worldwide, irrespective of income and other factors likely to affect health status

Lots more fascinating and interesting information here:

https://croakey.org/using-the-data-revolution-to-agitate-for-health-policy/

Great stuff about which I knew far too little until I read this article. Little would you realise that much of the work is sponsored by a former Mayor of New York (Michael Bloomberg)

Well worth the read!

David.