Sunday, July 10, 2011

Global Health Data Exchange [!]

For your viewing and researching pleasure. The data exchange is courtesy of the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. The goal is to collect all the random and not-so-random datasets floating around out there, thereby creating a "one-stop shopping" space for those interested in both tabulated and raw (census, survey, macro-health) data.

I found out about this just today while reading Sanjay Basu's latest blog post (a good one on global health data sources), and spent a better part of the browsing the site. At a first pass, the data exchange seems really comprehensive. As a grad student, I prided myself on knowing about every random dataset out there, something that took a lot of effort and time. Now, there is a nice, comprehensive external brain for such an endeavor. I hope this project continues along its current trajectory because it has a ton of promise. I would say that even in its current state it will prove quite useful for interested lay-people, policymakers, and hard-core researchers alike.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the nice feedback. We are investing a lot of time and energy to research and validate our metadata, and love to hear from our users. If you have feedback, comments or suggestions on how to improve the GHDx, please contact us at data@healthmetricsandevaluation.org.

Cheers,

Peter Speyer
Director, Data Development
Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME)