IfG.CC - The Potsdam eGovernment Competence Center

A key piece of health data that many of us take for granted is the recording of births and deaths. It fundamental on several levels. To measure population, you need to know how many births and deaths are adding and subtracting from your total population. Calculating rates of disease or death requires total population as a denominator. Without tracking causes of death, we are forced to estimate, or guess, the actual health of a population. To benefit from basic human rights, an individual needs, at very least, the acknowledgement that the have been born (that they exist), and that they have died. On an a programmatic level, its impossible to accurately assess effectiveness or cost-effectiveness of health campaigns without such basic data.

Yet the World Health Organization only receives reliable data on causes of death from 31 0f 193 member states. Each year an estimated 51 million births and 38 million deaths are unrecorded. This according to PLAN, a non-profit child health advocacy organization.

A key stumbling block in gathering vital health information is that in many countries parents have to travel to a government office to record a child's birth. In additional to cost and logistical hurdles, there are many countries where having the government know you exist is not considered a good thing. PLAN has found that mobile registries have been a good strategy for increasing vital health data collection.

In many cases we are talking about very basic data: A child was born. A person has died. Determining cause of death turns out to be more complicated than one might assume, but there could be basic categories for death: Apparent natural causes, death due to accident, death due to violence, death after a long illness.

This seems a natural fit for an mhealth application that could bring data collection to remote communities, and allow lay folks to enter their own data. Whether an extension of Datadyne's Episurveyor, or InSTEDD's mobile-phone based early warning system, using cellular systems to gather basic data seems a worthy improvement over current data collection efforts. At very least, doesn't each human deserve to be counted?

---

Autor(en)/Author(s): Ano Lobb

Quelle/Source: Justmeans, 20.09.2010

Bitte besuchen Sie/Please visit: