Health information in the new millennium: a gathering storm?

The current global preoccupation with outcomes-based development may inadvertently aggravate this precarious situation. Outcome measures are priority tasks for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) Poverty Reduction Strategy Plans the Global Fund to Fight AIDS Tuberculosis and Malaria (the Global Fund) and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization among others. As these policies and programmes begin to land in countries the demand for information accelerates rapidly. In many low-income countries the storm is brewing as a massive influx of monitoring programmes threatens to flatten the unsteady pillars of local health information systems. Instead of flattening everything in its path the current focus on outcomes should be used as an opportunity to reform and strengthen existing health information systems. To do so requires balancing the powerful demands of donors and special programmes with tenuous capacities to supply information according to priority needs of information for the health system as whole. (excerpt)