Journal article

Comparing tariff and medical assistant assigned causes of death from verbal autopsy interviews in Matlab, Bangladesh: Implications for a health and demographic surveillance system

RH Hazard, N Alam, HR Chowdhury, T Adair, S Alam, PK Streatfield, ID Riley, AD Lopez

Population Health Metrics | BMC | Published : 2018

Abstract

Background: Deaths in developing countries often occur outside health facilities, making it extremely difficult to gather reliable cause of death (COD) information. Automated COD assignment using a verbal autopsy instrument (VAI) has been proposed as a reliable and cost-effective alternative to traditional physician-certified verbal autopsy, but its performance is still being evaluated. The purpose of this study was to compare the similarity of diagnosis by Medical Assistants (MA) in the Matlab Health and Demographic Surveillance System (HDSS) with the SmartVA Analyze 1.2 (Tariff 2.0) diagnosis. Methods: This study took place between January 2011 and April 2014 in Matlab, Bangladesh. MA with..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Grants

Awarded by National Health and Medical Research Council


Funding Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia project grant, Improving methods to measure comparable mortality by cause (Grant no. 631494). The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.