New checklist to make health estimates more acceptable
Reliable statistics are vital in many areas of life – none more so than in public health, when knowing how many people die of or are made sick by particular diseases is essential for policymakers and planners to make the best decisions about how to prevent suffering and save lives.
Nothing beats counting individual cases and deaths. But many countries lack the resources and infrastructure to gather good quality data, and data are often missing for certain populations and time periods. Countries sometimes count in different ways, making comparisons problematic.
To fill those gaps, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and other researchers calculate estimates of health data based on complex methods, sometimes using indicators such as gross domestic product and education that are known to be drivers of health outcomes, as well as comparable data from other countries in the same region or with similar characteristics.
Here is the problem: around the world, different statisticians use different ways of calculating estimates, with (unsurprisingly) different results. And they haven't always shared all the details on how they arrive at their estimates; there has been no agreement on how to disclose methodologies.
The Guidelines for Accurate and Transparent Health Estimates Reporting, or GATHER, is a checklist of 18 best practices that sets the standard for disclosing how health estimates are developed. The GATHER checklist was developed by WHO and researchers from around the world including the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington in Seattle, and was published in the Lancet and PLOS Medicine.
GATHER includes requirements for disclosing which data are used to calculate estimates, and for making them available to others. It also includes a requirement to disclose how the computer code used to crunch the numbers can be accessed, making it possible for others to reproduce estimates, making them more robust.
Both WHO and IHME have agreed to comply with GATHER when they publish new global health estimates. Journals including the Lancet, PLOS Medicine, the International Journal of Epidemiology and the Bulletin of the World Health Organization plan to ask authors to comply with GATHER, and it is expected that other journals to follow suit.
GATHER will also help researchers to be more efficient and make better use of research funds; greater transparency will enable researchers to build on the work done by others, instead of wasting months or even years of work trying to reproduce it.
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