The Global Hybrid Summit 2022 closing keynote address
Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is my great pleasure to give the last talk of the 2022 Health Data Forum Global Hybrid Summit.
It is probably a great relief for you too.
We are hopefully coming out of a pandemic. A pandemic where in the first 2 years, excess mortality associated with Covid19 was almost 15 million people. Not all of these 15 million died of Covid19, but many died indirectly owing to overwhelmed health systems. Were it not for the extraordinary scientific progress made in recent decades, the rapid development and rollout of vaccines, that death toll could have been so much worse.
But the Covid19 pandemic is not over. In October 2022 alone, more than 50,000 Covid19 deaths were reported. We await with trepidation the coming winter months.
Even though this pandemic is not over, public health officials are already thinking about the future. Covid19 has naturally provoked a desire to be better prepared for future health emergencies.
In this age of quantification, the solution in the minds of many is to develop dashboards or more indicators.
But there is a saying among soldiers that generals always fight the last battle. I worry that we may be guilty of doing the same thing. By building dashboards are we preparing to fight the last pandemic, the last health emergency?
We don’t know what the next health emergency will be, but we can be reasonably certain it will not be what we expect now. We can be almost certain it will surprise our dashboards.
Dashboards and indicators can play a hugely important role in transmitting key messages. My point is that they have their limitations. We should not put all our faith in dashboards – that is the road to ruin.
Statistics play a dual role. They not only measure reality, statistics shape or define reality. A dashboard will measure reality, but it will also define it.
As an aside, after the SDG indicators were selected, they were criticized in some quarters as being reductionist. This struck me as an odd criticism, as statistics are by definition reductionist. That is their very purpose – to distil the complexities of life into a set of metrics that help us to understand patterns and associations.
Thus, a dashboard may prepare us against emergencies, but it may also blinker us against the unexpected. They may give us a false sense of security. If dashboards told us everything we need, why we would not have road accidents?
We have spent the past 3 days discussing data quality. We are collectively concerned with data quality because we want to ensure we are producing accurate research, that we are producing robust estimates. We understand that poor-quality data may lead to poor decisions, and in turn poor outcomes.
In this age of measurement and quantification, where druckeresque phrases like ‘what cannot be measured cannot be managed’ are pronounced as self-evident truths, where anything unmetrified is not to be trusted, but everything that is quantified is regarded as empirical and objective, we have a responsibility, I would argue, not only to improve the quality of our data but to do more to convey uncertainty, to communicate the limitations of our data and statistics, so that decision-makers understand that they cannot delegate their responsibilities to a dashboard.
My reflections, lead me to conclude that there is no shortcut to analytical capacity. We need to foster and encourage, creative, analytical capacity.
Before finishing I would like to offer one final reflection. When I began work as a statistician in the early 1990s, it was understood our mission was to provide evidence to inform decision-making. I stress the word inform. It was understood that decision-makers would weigh the evidence, but take into consideration other factors, political, cultural…and so forth. Evidence was just one element in the complex equation of decision-making.
Since then, that phrase has morphed into data-driven decisions. To my mind, that is a completely different scenario. Data-driven implies data are making the decisions, not just informing them. Taking this change to its logical conclusion, data-driven decision-making removes accountability from politics and politicians – the politician can now claim they had no choice, the data made the decision. To an extent, this is true, this is where we are going with AI and ML, but it is a noteworthy shift in language, and one worth reflecting on.
I would like to conclude with a quote from one of my favourite books – The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Muller.
‘measurement is not an alternative to judgement: measurement demands judgement’
About the author
Steve MacFeely is the Director of Data and Analytics at the World Health Organization. He is also Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Policy Studies at University College Cork in Ireland and the Director of the IASE International Statistical Literacy Program. He is co-chair of the Committee of the Chief Statisticians of the UN System (CCS-UN), chairs the Advisory Board of the Statistical Journal of the IAOS, and is a member of the statistical advisory panel to the UNDP Human Development Index. He is an elected member of the International Statistics Institute. He was a co-lead on the Data Strategy of the Secretary-General for Action by Everyone, Everywhere 2020 – 2022, and a lead author of the 2020 System-wide Roadmap for Innovating UN Data and Statistics. Before joining WHO, Steve was the Head of Statistics and Information at UNCTAD. Prior to joining the UN, he was the Deputy Director-General at the Central Statistics Office (CSO) in Ireland and Programme Director of the joint CSO – Institute of Public Administration ‘Professional Diploma in Official Statistics & Policy Evaluation’.
https://www.facebook.com/v2.7/plugins/comments.php?app_id=&channel=https%3A%2F%2Fstaticxx.facebook.com%2Fx%2Fconnect%2Fxd_arbiter%2F%3Fversion%3D46%23cb%3Df2f7619bd8d5f6%26domain%3Dwww.healthdataforum.eu%26is_canvas%3Dfalse%26origin%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.healthdataforum.eu%252Ff3bae7cd24561ec%26relation%3Dparent.parent&color_scheme=light&container_width=860&height=100&href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.healthdataforum.eu%2Fhealth-data-forum-global-hybrid-summit-2022-closing-keynote-address&locale=en_US&mobile=false&sdk=joey&version=v2.7&width=
