GENEVA — In a major push to strengthen global health information systems and improve health outcomes worldwide, the World Health Organization (WHO) has announced a transformative new approach to expanding access to life-saving health data. Unveiled today as part of the organization’s ongoing commitment to public health enhancement—particularly in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic—the initiative is known as the SCORE for Health Data Technical Package.
The unprecedented global health crisis triggered by the coronavirus has laid bare an urgent, systemic vulnerability across numerous nations: a profound lack of timely, reliable data required to drive strategic health action and coordinate emergency responses. According to the WHO, far too many countries still lack both the basic infrastructure needed to routinely gather comprehensive health data and the necessary analytical capacity to translate that raw data into effective public health interventions and emergency management strategies.
“Countries must be able to measure progress to make progress,” said WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, emphasizing the critical interplay between robust statistical tracking and successful healthcare outcomes. “Particularly during COVID-19, reliable data is the best way to coordinate response efforts and improve health in all areas.”
Public health experts note that accurate health data are fundamentally necessary to understand specific, localized country needs, allowing governments to tailor interventions to improve community health and save lives. Furthermore, reliable data helps direct scarce financial and logistical resources precisely to where they are needed most, maximizing the impact of limited public health budgets.
To address these systemic deficiencies, the newly introduced SCORE Technical Package—which stands for Survey, Count, Optimize, Review, and Enable—aims to radically improve the availability of timely, reliable, validated, and comparable health data across the globe. For the first time, this initiative consolidates all the key elements required for optimized health information system performance into a single, harmonized package. In practical terms, SCORE is designed to help governments around the globe set high benchmarks and dramatically improve standards in healthcare delivery and policy formulation.
The initiative arrives in direct response to the alarming gaps in data availability highlighted in the WHO World Health Statistics 2020 report. To bridge these chasms, the SCORE package incorporates more than 90 universally accepted tools and standards specifically tailored for health information system strengthening.
“Using data to inform public health priorities and strategies has never been more important,” said Dr. Kelly Henning, Director of Public Health Programs at Bloomberg Philanthropies, which provided vital funding to support the development of the initiative. “The SCORE Technical Package provides country governments around the world with high-quality, essential technical guidance so that countries can strengthen their own data systems.”
The WHO has expressed strong pride in partnering with the Bloomberg Philanthropies Data for Health Initiative to deliver this timely resource to member states, noting that cross-sector collaboration is vital for addressing complex international health challenges.
The initial release of the comprehensive package includes two foundational core documents, laying the groundwork for governments to begin immediate self-assessments and strategic overhauls of their statistical reporting architectures.
“We must keep score to save lives. WHO is committed to working with countries and partners to rapidly scale up capacity for data collection and use in order to improve policy and performance,” added Dr. Samira Asma, Assistant Director-General for Data, Analytics and Delivery for Impact at WHO. “We must act now to invest in statistical systems in countries, respond to this pandemic and meet the SDGs and the Triple Billion targets. Our window of opportunity is closing, and we cannot wait to address data gaps. Data use to address country needs has to be a priority today.”
Public health leadership stresses that country-owned, disaggregated data will be absolutely essential for building more resilient and sustainable health systems moving forward. The COVID-19 pandemic has served as both an urgent wake-up call and a stark reminder of the massive health infrastructure challenges that countries still need to address. At the same time, international health officials view the crisis as an unprecedented opportunity to build back better through international solidarity, transparent information-sharing, and deep cross-border collaboration.
The SCORE package is presented as a prime example of how a collaborative approach can directly benefit individual nations by providing a common set of practical, actionable, and flexible tools based on universally shared standards. WHO representatives reiterate that the global community will only be truly successful in combatting COVID-19 and future health emergencies if nations work together cohesively.
Future components of the SCORE Technical Package are scheduled to be released later this year. These upcoming additions will include the SCORE Assessment Instrument alongside global, regional, and country status reports. Together, these forthcoming elements will provide a complete, end-to-end package of information enabling governments to plan, execute, and monitor progress against national and subnational health priorities, as well as broader global targets.
— By Alyssa Palmquist, World Health Organization
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