老司机直播

(photo by Infocux Technologies via Flickr)

Global Health Summit: using big data to assess health of nations

Big data are large information sets that 鈥 when interpreted accurately 鈥 can illustrate the success of public health and healthcare delivery. But can they also provide an effective means for understanding both global and local health problems and creating solutions?

At the Global Health Summit, taking place November 3 to 5, researchers from Dalla Lana School of Public Health and across 老司机直播 will be exploring the uses for the types of big data that are becoming more readily available. (.)
 
鈥淥ne reason the University of Toronto is interested in developing skills with big data further is that Ontario is blessed with good data,鈥 said David Henry, senior advisor to the dean of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and director of the . 鈥淲e are trying to bring all the health data sets together to do different types of research.鈥

Professor Prabhat Jha of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and Laura Rosella, an assistant professor at the School, are both involved with the Ontario Death Study, reviewing the deaths of 1.9 million Ontarians to determine disease trends and geographical death patterns.

Rosella is exploring how to make such data richer by linking it to other population data sets, including information about broader health determinants such as levels of education and income. Such linkages can become a way of examining various forms of inequality.

鈥淕ender equity is a global issue that has one of the biggest impacts on health,鈥 said Rosella, also a scientist at and the . 鈥淭here are examples worldwide where improving women鈥檚 health has had an effect on the family and the community.鈥

Jha is renowned for his Million Death Study, a project to determine the causes of mortality in 2.4 million representative households in India, a country where many people die at home without autopsies or death certificates. Henry said that Jha鈥檚 approach, with its innovative verbal autopsy technique, can be useful to other developing countries that need basic population health data.

鈥淕lobally, the most important information 鈥 and an obvious place to start 鈥 is how people die,鈥 said Jha, who is also the founding director of St. Michael's Hospital鈥檚 . 鈥淭he system we鈥檙e using in India is a practical solution where there is a big global gap in knowledge.鈥

The other types of data sets that will be explored during the summit are:

  • Social media data: These are new healthcare tools. Textual analysis can analyze key words in Twitter feeds or monitor Google queries as a way of tracking an epidemic
  • Biobank data: Detailed information at the chromosomal level is a tool that can be applied to diseases, such as a virus like Ebola, to determine how it attacks the body
  • Insurance data: Such data are valuable in developed countries, as well as those trying to develop a healthcare system. Data can be reviewed to see how the system is being used, what the outcomes of care are and where any inequalities might exist

鈥淭his summit will help us to show that the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and 老司机直播 are serious about initiatives to harness data within Ontario and globally,鈥 Henry said.

鈥淒alla Lana is putting a stake in the ground. We鈥檙e committed to aggregating and bringing analytics to bear on these data, and we want to train healthcare professionals to use this information to improve health and health systems around the world.鈥

Topics

The Bulletin Brief logo

Subscribe to The Bulletin Brief