Bloomberg launches project to improve health data in developing countries

Bloomberg Philanthropies, in partnership with the Australian government, has launched an initiative to help improve public health data collection in developing countries.

Over the next four years, the $100 million ‘Data for Health Programme’ will be implemented in 20 low- and middle-income countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America.

The specific cities or countries where it will be implemented have not been mentioned yet

It is, however, believed that Bangladesh will be a destination since the Philanthropies has public health projects here.

The new initiative, announced from New York on Monday, will provide governments, aid organisations, and public health leaders with tools and systems to better collect data and use it to prioritise health challenges, develop policies, deploy resources, and measure success.

This is to help 1.2 billion people of developing countries live healthier and have longer lives, Bloomberg says in a statement from New York.

Each year the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 65 percent of all deaths worldwide – 35 million each year – go unrecorded.  Millions more deaths lack a documented cause.

This gap in data creates major obstacles for understanding and addressing public health problems.

“Reliable data is absolutely essential to problem solving, and nowhere it is more important than in public health,” Michael Bloomberg was quoted as saying in the statement.

“This new programme will greatly enhance our understanding of the public health challenges we face – and greatly improve our ability to address them.

“We’ve set an ambitious goal, and working together with the Australian government, we believe we can meet it,” the former mayor of New York said.

The University of Melbourne in Australia, CDC Foundation, Union North America, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and World Health Organisation are the programme partners.

Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said, “Australia’s partnership on Data for Health coincides with the launch of innovationXchange, a new initiative to embrace exploration, experimentation, and risk through a focus on innovation.

“Greater innovation in development assistance will allow us to do a better job of tackling the world’s most daunting problems, such as a lack of credible health data.”

Bloomberg Philanthropies uses data to identify some of the world’s most pressing problems, implement solutions, and monitor their progress.

In 2014, Fast Company named Bloomberg Philanthropies as one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies for “doing good, methodically.”

The ‘Data for Health’ will support new mechanisms for conducting public health surveys, in addition to improving the recording of births and deaths.

These surveys will monitor major risk factors for early death, including non-communicable diseases such as cancer and diabetes.

With information from these surveys, illness caused by day-to-day behaviours such as tobacco use and poor nutrition habits could be targeted, addressed and prevented, Bloomberg says.

This initiative will also take advantage of the widespread use of mobile phone devices in developing countries to enhance the efficiency of traditional household surveys, which are typically time-consuming and expensive.

To assist governments with translating data into policy change, Bloomberg Philanthropies will support training programmes for local officials.

This training will enable officials to better interpret data and use it to inform programme and policy decisions.