Global Health Observatory, one-stop shop for health data

Researchers wanting to find out countries with the highest rates of tuberculosis often find it difficult to pin down latest information from hundreds of columns of numbers often presented in a format that can overwhelm passionate data analysts.

However, improvements are under way at World Health Organisation (WHO's) online Global Health Observatory (GHO), which makes health data easier to find and use for specialists such as statisticians, epidemiologists, economists and public health researchers and individuals interested in global health.

The GHO, which is a "one-stop shop" for the world's largest and most comprehensive collection of up-to-date health data, provides free public access through a single internet page to a vast reservoir of data and analyses on the situation and trends for global health priorities, integrating around 1,000 health indicators.

While WHO's health information comes from several sources including government birth and death registration, health systems, surveys and censuses, research projects and databases maintained by other organizations, countries are closely involved in discussions to improve data collection and develop the best methods of estimation where there are gaps in the data.

Philippe Boucher, who leads the technology side of the GHO team, said the new version, due to be launched early 2013, will help make WHO's data more user-friendly, easier to access and convert to a variety of formats so that it can be used for different purposes.

Interestingly, the GHO shares and integrates data with regional health observatories and partnership databases. For instance, WHO's Western Pacific Region used the GHO as a model to build its own database, the Health Information and Intelligence Platform.

Arlene Quiambao, WPRO Project manager, says the collaboration has saved many resources. "Instead of gathering data from different websites and databases, we just had to integrate GHO and our regional database. And now, we have more time for understanding what data means for current and future policies and programmes, and making timely evidence-based decisions," she says.

The GHO is more than a database repository with priority issues that impact health including the environment, road safety, alcohol and nutrition as well as specific diseases such as cholera, HIV and malaria.

These pages provide analyses using core indicators, database views, major publications and links to relevant web pages. New features include a range of interactive world maps that display the latest health information for each country which can be shared through social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

(source: www.businessdayonline.com)