Health Data Needs for Research and Policy Task Force is a vital programme aimed at identifying the health data needed for research and policy, and achieving a comprehensive system with health data from many countries, updated on a daily basis, which can be easily retrieved by queries. Examples of such queries: Age specific and sex specific mortality rates from a specific disease; distribution of infectious diseases by age and sex. The data needs should be well identified and defined. Some major lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic pointed out in papers published by ASPHER were: the need to promote timely, well-resourced and comprehensive epidemiological reporting systems; the need to expand active surveillance such as environmental monitoring, like wastewater testing for polio and coronaviruses, due to lack of high-resolution data, disaggregated by age, sex, and other demographics and area; there is a critical need for increased transparency and timely data sharing between nations. A standardised approach to data collection and dissemination, supported by interoperable technologies is essential for accurate epidemiological profiling and swift responses. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted deficiencies in global health surveillance networks, underscoring the need for improved health data exchange. These lessons should be translated into actions. This sub-group within ASPHER PHE TF will map the required steps for achieving these goals and step toward implementing them.
Chair:
Avi Magid, Maastricht University, The Netherlands & Ben Gurion University, Israel
Members:
Hazem Agha, Al Quds University, Palestine
Mariana Castro, Libson NOVA University, Portugal
Mary Codd, University College Dublin, Ireland
Manfred Green, University of Haifa, Israel
Rok Hrzic, Maastricht University, The Netherlands
Henrique Lopes, Lisbon NOVA University, Portugal
Alison McCallum, University of Edinburgh, UK
Dorit Nitzan, Ben Gurion University, Israel
Alena Petrakova, Palacky University Olomouc, Czechia
Jiří Vévoda, Palacky University Olomouc, Czechia
Collaborators:
Mika Gissler
Anabelle Macedo Silva
Vladimir Prikazsky