A systematic review of the quality and timeliness of public health data

Abstract

The quality and timeliness of public health data is a topic of prime concern in this information age. Many epidemiologists, health scientists and researchers in the public health domain have consistently emphasized on the importance of the need for the right timely data for the right decision-making at the right time. In other words, there is an urgent need to ensure that the right data reaches the right people at the right time. However, this urgent need appears to be misleading and not achievable in the current public health practices and workflow processes. The workflow processes in the current healthcare environments enable data collection to be delayed and only to be captured when the events have already occurred. In this paper, a systematic review of relevant scientific literature was used to not only explore the complexity and uniqueness of public health data, but also explain why improving the quality and timeliness of public health data is a challenging endeavor for many epidemiologists, health scientists and researchers. Recommendations for streamlining the public health workflow processes to support the generation of high-quality and timely public health data were also discussed in the paper.