Manish Kumar, MPH, a doctoral student in UNC’s Carolina Health Informatics program, was invited to attend the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Regional Advisor Consultation April 17-19 in Cairo, Egypt. He was one of three international experts who presented research and technical expertise during the consultation.
Kumar also is a senior technical specialist for health systems strengthening in the MEASURE Evaluation project at Carolina Population Center.
WHO and its partners have developed the “SCORE for health data” technical package, which includes evidence-based strategies and interventions needed to strengthen country health data systems and monitor progress toward the United Nations’ health-related Sustainable Development Goals.
The objective of the consultation was to review and validate SCORE framework and data collection instruments, define the data collection methodology for the SCORE assessment and draft regional plans and resource allocation for implementation of the SCORE assessment. The SCORE for health data technical package includes five essential strategies: survey populations and health risks, count births, deaths and causes of death, optimize health services data, review progress and performance, and enable data use for policy and action.
In the MEASURE Evaluation project, the U.S. Agency for International Development’s global flagship health information systems strengthening project, Kumar conducts health information system research, implementation and capacity building activities.
The WHO team is reviewing information from the three-day consultation to finalize an assessment tool. The plan is to collect, consolidate and analyze data from countries in the coming year and to publish a global report on the state of country health information systems.
With rapid growth in adoption and use of digital health technologies in the lower- and middle-income countries, it becomes essential to have a shared language to describe uses of digital health technology. To fill this gap, the WHO team had recently published the Classification of Digital Health Interventions v 1.0 document. Kumar was one of the contributors to this document. This classification lays a foundation to facilitate use of shared terms in design, monitoring and measurement of digital health interventions.
