Are cause of death data fit for purpose? evidence from 20 countries at different levels of socio-economic development

Abstract

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Many countries have used the new ANACONDA (Analysis of Causes of National Death for Action) tool to assess the quality of their cause of death data (COD), but no cross-country analysis has been done to verify how different or similar patterns of diagnostic errors and data quality are in countries or how they are related to the local cultural or epidemiological environment or to levels of development. Our objective is to measure whether the usability of COD data and the patterns of unusable codes are related to a country's level of socio-economic development. METHODS: We have assessed the quality of 20 national COD datasets from the WHO Mortality Database by assessin..