Counting Every Child - implementation and methods in registry-based epidemiology
This course will take you through the core methods in development and implementation of digital health registries for child health using free and open-source systems, as well as the basics of registry-based epidemiology in using such datasets.
Main content
Course leaders
J. Frederik Frøen, Research Director of the Division for Health Services, Norwegian Institute of Public Health, and Professor at Department of Global Public Health and Primary Care, UiB.
Nina Øyen, Professor in Epidemiology at Department of Global Public Health and Primary Care, University of Bergen (UiB) and Senior Consultant in Clinical Genetics, Haukeland University Hospital, Bergen.
Counting every child and effective monitoring of universal health coverage through the continuity of care, from pregnancy to adolescence, requires population-based public health registries. Counting adverse outcomes in children requires comparisons to numbers in the general population registered in public heath registers.
The number of LMIC introducing digital health registries is increasing rapidly, e.g. for antenatal care, births, childhood immunization, and child nutrition programs. The WHO is promoting digital health registries in the form of digital adaptation kits for their guidelines to strengthen public health services. Few LMIC have a long experience and capacity in development, implementation, and effective use and analysis of registry data, and scientific competency in this field is in growing demand.
What can digital health registries do for child health?
This course starts with a day of exploring the current status of global data for child health, the gaps, how routine public health registries can help fill the gaps. We introduce new knowledge, interventions, strengthening of health systems, and research opportunities that arise with the designs and methods of population-based registries.
Development and implementation of digital health registries
Few of the benefits from digital health registries are gained from simply transferring paper registers to digital “paper on screen”. Nor will a state-of-the-art digital health registry deliver if not implemented appropriately. Understanding how health registries are designed and implemented is critical to understanding how to use and analyze the data. In two days, we will walk you through theories, methods, freely available open source tools, ethical and legal considerations, and implementation strategies in developing digital health registries in LMIC settings. We will show you case stories of implementations, and how implementation and design affect data.
Core methods in registry-based epidemiology
The following four days, you will learn the basics and particularities of registry-based epidemiology. What kind of data do you get from various types of registries? How do you assess and address data quality issues? What are valuable designs and methods for analysis? How to avoid or reduce bias and confounding? How to understand causality when using registry-based data?
You should have some basic training in epidemiology and statistics to fully benefit from these four days (see reading list).