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Open AccessValidation of physician certified verbal autopsy using conventional autopsy: a large study of adult non-external causes of death in a metropolitan area in Brazil
Reliable mortality data are essential for the development of public health policies. In Brazil, although there is a well-consolidated universal system for mortality data, the quality of information on causes o...
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Open AccessCorrection to: Improving methods to measure comparable mortality by cause (IMMCMC): gold standard verbal autopsy dataset
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Open AccessImproving methods to measure comparable mortality by cause (IMMCMC): gold standard verbal autopsy dataset
Gold standard cause of death data is critically important to improve verbal autopsy (VA) methods in diagnosing cause of death where civil and vital registration systems are inadequate or poor. As part of a thr...
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Open AccessGenerating cause of death information to inform health policy: implementation of an automated verbal autopsy system in the Solomon Islands
Good quality cause of death (COD) information is fundamental for formulating and evaluating public health policy; yet most deaths in develo** countries, including the Solomon Islands, occur at home without m...
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Open AccessGenerating age-specific mortality statistics from incomplete death registration data: two applications of the empirical completeness method
The study aims to assess two approaches that apply the empirical completeness method to generate age-specific mortality statistics from incomplete death registration systems.
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Open AccessPublic health utility of cause of death data: applying empirical algorithms to improve data quality
Accurate, comprehensive, cause-specific mortality estimates are crucial for informing public health decision making worldwide. Incorrectly or vaguely assigned deaths, defined as garbage-coded deaths, mask the ...
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Open AccessEstimating causes of out-of-hospital deaths in China: application of SmartVA methods
Most deaths in China occur at home, making it difficult to collect reliable cause of death (CoD) information. Verbal autopsy (VA) was applied using the SmartVA tool to a sample of home deaths in China to explo...
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Open AccessImproving cause of death certification in the Philippines: implementation of an electronic verbal autopsy decision support tool (SmartVA auto-analyse) to aid physician diagnoses of out-of-facility deaths
The majority of deaths in the Philippines occur out-of-facility and require a medical certificate of cause of death by Municipal Health Officers (MHOs) for burial. MHOs lack a standardised certification proces...
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Open AccessRoutine mortality surveillance to identify the cause of death pattern for out-of-hospital adult (aged 12+ years) deaths in Bangladesh: introduction of automated verbal autopsy
In Bangladesh, a poorly functioning national system of registering deaths and determining their causes leaves the country without important information on which to inform health programming, particularly for t...
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Open AccessEffectiveness of training interventions to improve quality of medical certification of cause of death: systematic review and meta-analysis
Valid cause of death data are essential for health policy formation. The quality of medical certification of cause of death (MCCOD) by physicians directly affects the utility of cause of death data for public ...
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Open AccessThe role of overweight and obesity in adverse cardiovascular disease mortality trends: an analysis of multiple cause of death data from Australia and the USA
In recent years, there have been adverse trends in premature cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality rates (35–74 years) in the USA and Australia. Following long-term declines, rates in the USA are now increasi...
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Open AccessMeasuring the completeness of death registration in 2844 Chinese counties in 2018
Death registration completeness has never been assessed at the county level in China. Such analyses would provide critical intelligence to monitor the performance of the vital registration system and yield adj...
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Open AccessBorn to fail: flaws in replication design produce intended results
We recently published in BMC Medicine an evaluation of the comparative diagnostic performance of InSilicoVA, a software to map the underlying causes of death from verbal autopsy interviews. The developers of this...
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Open AccessImproving the quality of cause of death data for public health policy: are all ‘garbage’ codes equally problematic?
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Open AccessAddressing critical knowledge and capacity gaps to sustain CRVS system development
Improving civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) systems requires strengthening the capacity of the CRVS workforce. The improvement of data collection and diagnostic practices must be accompanied by ef...
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Open AccessReducing ignorance about who dies of what: research and innovation to strengthen CRVS systems
The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) agenda offers a major impetus to consolidate and accelerate development in civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) systems. Strengthening CRVS systems is an SDG ou...
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Open AccessWhere there is no hospital: improving the notification of community deaths
Globally, an estimated two-thirds of all deaths occur in the community, the majority of which are not attended by a physician and remain unregistered. Identifying and registering these deaths in civil registra...
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Open AccessAutomated verbal autopsy: from research to routine use in civil registration and vital statistics systems
The majority of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) do not have adequate civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) systems to properly support health policy formulation. Verbal autopsy (VA), long use...
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Article
Open AccessANACONDA: a new tool to improve mortality and cause of death data
The need to monitor the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and to have access to reliable and timely mortality data has created a strong demand in countries for tools that can assist them in this. ANACONDA (...
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Open AccessImproving medical certification of cause of death: effective strategies and approaches based on experiences from the Data for Health Initiative
Accurate and timely cause of death (COD) data are essential for informed public health policymaking. Medical certification of COD generally provides the majority of COD data in a population and is an essential...
