The more public health data is shared, the better the world’s public health outcome.
So says an analysis that was recently released by a team of researchers, including several from The University of Pittsburgh. The analysis was published in the journal BMC Public Health.
At present, public health data isn’t always shared on a local, national or international data. Researchers wanted to know why public health data isn’t shared as widely as for example genomic data is.
“We did this review and found that there are about 20 barriers in all different categories that actually limit the use and sharing of public health data for research and policy,” said Willem Van Panhuis, a professor of Epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health and lead author on this analysis.
Some of the barriers are obvious, such as privacy issues with medical data. But other issues such as the data isn’t stored at times, the data is kept in paper format rather than electronic format or the data is lost.
Van Panhuis said this is part of the big data and open data movement. He said the opportunities afforded with innovative analysis and new technology development are not being met.
“Any place that has data that is of incredible value for these breakthrough discoveries potentially but that for a large number of reasons are just being locked up or unused is becoming more and more of an issue, a political issue as well as an economic issue,” he said.
There is also the issue of accountability to the public.
To not have these barriers would require communication between local agencies as well as international agencies such as The World Health Organization and the World Trade Organization.
