Saranath

It’s good to try different ways of data collection after analyzing situation. For data collection, no one method can fit all projects and conditions.

It always happens that site staff may find their ways to enter the data into the CRF. In this case, information that they recorded in their notebook will be considered as “source document”. Then they need to extract data into the CRF. You may need a process of source document verification. We will talk about this in other topics.

Thanks for sharing! Having a good questionnaire or Case Record Form design would really help on data collection and data quality.

Health informatics is actually a hybrid between health, IT, and management. Most people who work in this field right now are usually those who have experience working in projects related to health informatics. Although these people are very good at working in the health informatics field, but they might lack some potential theoretical concepts,…[Read more]

Hi Chanapong, I couldn’t agree more on the challenges you specify. As this is quite a new field, we really don’t have an official position for “health informatician”. In the US, there is a health informatics sub-board for medical doctors. I wish we could have this career path in Thailand soon.

Good Points! @Thanachol and @Tullaya

Measles is a disease that WHO targets to eliminate in 5 WHO regions in 2020. So, an effective surveillance system is really needed for the disease.

It is difficult to balance between timeliness and accurate of information. Most of the time, the government tried to get most accurate information before public announcement. However, in this digital world, news spread very fast via social media. And this unclear information from news and social media may cause public panic.

Trust is one of the most important issue. According to the failed risk communication during the SARS outbreak, people may still lack of trust for the government on communicating disease outbreak. The consequence still remain even after 10 years of the SARS incident.

I think it is important to have information that provide a solid evidence on health impact of air pollution. Currently, applications to measure PM2.5 are widely available, particularly in big cities. However, we do not have a strong or standard guideline on how to mitigate the risk. Only asking people to wear mask wouldn’t be much helpful. It s…[Read more]

Agree! Sometimes people do not realize until we have a solid evidence or measurement to show that problem. Information is really important!

Good Point! Ameen.

I think our country does not declare public health emergency for the air pollution yet. Probably the government still think that the situation is “under control” based on our capacity and capability 🙂

Chalermphol, Do you think that this air pollution in the North can be called as “Public Health Emergency”? Or it’s just a normal public health problem.

Yes! It’s all about “Data”, “IT”, “People”!

Thank you all for sharing your opinion!

Good point! Blood pressure monitoring alone might not truly reflect hypertension, as some patients may currently on treatment. In addition, how could we prevent duplicated records if a person go to multiple drug store. You may need to record identification number of a person (probably citizen ID), but could we do that at drug store?

Yes. Analytic and research support are very good functions that can help to improve the surveillance activities. However, to get a good and reliable results, you need good and valid dataset to work with. So, the surveillance system should have timely, accurate, and complete reporting cases.