10th Annual Western Regional Health Conference

I recently attended this Health Conference event that pinpointed major changes in health that are coinciding with changing environments on a global scale.   They had several tracks that you could follow during this weekend event, I mostly followed the policy, ethics and and human rights tracks, which are topics that I found interesting, they had other tracks which included Sharing the Worlds Resources; Human Rights and Health; Migrant, Refugee and Displacement Health; Policy, Law, Health and Wellbeing; Ethics in Global Health; Changing Patterns of Disease; and Technology Revolution and Health. I recommend it for anyone, next year they will be in Seattle.

First of all there was way to much interesting information to put into one little blog page so i choose, instead to talk about one of the lectures that I found particularly interesting and very applicable to Dawn's global health class. It was a lecture by Abraham Flaxman. Abraham is the Assistant Professor of Global Health at the Institute for Health Metrics And Evaluation (IHME), his lecture was on the Big Data Revolution in Global Burden Of Disease Measurement.He spoke about the amazing new innovations in how we are using DALYs to measure the burden of disease and how we can use this technology to better allocate foreign aid monies to higher priority global issues.

One thing that I found particularly fascinating was when Flaxman displayed a recent GBD comparison map that compares the different diseases and causes of death. I spent about 2 hours messing with the different details of this map. I recommend anyone interested in how the global burden of disease is distributed to check it out and share some of your findings. Beware this is a weapon of mass distraction! There is also a massive amount of research data on GBDs on the IHME website that is fascinating and filled with great new measuring tools and some of the most recent research that is being done to improve on DALYs worldwide.

Flaxmen also discussed how they are now using a cellphone app to collect data on deaths in areas that have no data collection! They are calling a verbal autopsy. The interviewers asks close family questions about events lending to the death of their loved one and the app provides probable cause of death instantaneously! This is improving accuracy of vital registration immensely!

Finally, Flaxmen talked about how it is up to us as students and future global health advocates to turn this data revolution into information and eventually, into knowledge and evidence!

Thanks for letting me nerd out :)