A composite metric for assessing data on mortality and causes of death: the vital statistics performance index

Population Health Metrics

Alan D Lopez¹  Christopher JL Murray²  Lene Mikkelsen⁴  Diego Gonzalez-Medina²  Charles Atkinson²  Mohsen Naghavi²  Rafael Lozano³  David E Phillips² 

[1] School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne, 207 Bouverie St., Level 5, Melbourne, VIC 3010, Australia;Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, University of Washington, 2301 5th Ave. Suite 600, Seattle, WA 98121, USA;National Institute of Public Health, Universidad No. 655 Colonia Santa María Ahuacatitlán, Cerrada Los Pinos y Caminera, Cuernavaca, MOR 62100, México;LM Consulting, Independent Consultant, 4/78 Cairns St., Brisbane, QLD 4169, Australia

关键词: Health information systems;    Data quality;    Vital registration;    Civil registration;    Vital statistics;    Causes of death;    Mortality;   

Others  :  802369
DOI  :  10.1186/1478-7954-12-14

 received in 2014-01-16, accepted in 2014-04-23,  发布年份 2014

【 摘 要 】

Background

Timely and reliable data on causes of death are fundamental for informed decision-making in the health sector as well as public health research. An in-depth understanding of the quality of data from vital statistics (VS) is therefore indispensable for health policymakers and researchers. We propose a summary index to objectively measure the performance of VS systems in generating reliable mortality data and apply it to the comprehensive cause of death database assembled for the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2013 Study.

Methods

We created a Vital Statistics Performance Index, a composite of six dimensions of VS strength, each assessed by a separate empirical indicator. The six dimensions include: quality of cause of death reporting, quality of age and sex reporting, internal consistency, completeness of death reporting, level of cause-specific detail, and data availability/timeliness. A simulation procedure was developed to combine indicators into a single index. This index was computed for all country-years of VS in the GBD 2013 cause of death database, yielding annual estimates of overall VS system performance for 148 countries or territories.

Results

The six dimensions impacted the accuracy of data to varying extents. VS performance declines more steeply with declining simulated completeness than for any other indicator. The amount of detail in the cause list reported has a concave relationship with overall data accuracy, but is an important driver of observed VS performance. Indicators of cause of death data quality and age/sex reporting have more linear relationships with simulated VS performance, but poor cause of death reporting influences observed VS performance more strongly. VS performance is steadily improving at an average rate of 2.10% per year among the 148 countries that have available data, but only 19.0% of global deaths post-2000 occurred in countries with well-performing VS systems.

Conclusions

Objective and comparable information about the performance of VS systems and the utility of the data that they report will help to focus efforts to strengthen VS systems. Countries and the global health community alike need better intelligence about the accuracy of VS that are widely and often uncritically used in population health research and monitoring.

【 授权许可】

   
2014 Phillips et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

【 图 表 】

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