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Concluding thoughts

Watch Olakunle Alonge, Svea Closser, Anna Kalbarczyk, and Aditi Rao summarize the course "Collecting and Using Data for Disease Control" (Step 3.24).
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ANNA KALBARCZYK: Tracing polio to its final hiding places and acting swiftly to prevent outbreaks and resurgence has taken collaboration, ingenuity, and sustained investment.
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ADITI RAO: Through this course, we have explored key components of the polio surveillance systems, its varied functionality across contexts, and how it contributes to strategic decision-making. Two themes have reached across the topics in this course. The first is the promise and limits of technology.
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OLAKUNLE ALONGE: As we have explored, technology can be a time-saving and useful tool, one that can give planners insight into what is happening on the ground.
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SVEA CLOSSER: At the same time, technology is not a panacea. It doesn’t magically improve data quality, nor does it work the same way in all places. It’s critical to understand local politics and local culture when introducing new technologies to maximize their effectiveness.
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ADITI RAO: The second theme is the importance of incentives. Data is collected and interpreted by people. And the quality of both the data and the analysis depends on whether people are incentivized right. To both be transparent about what is happening and to dig into the reasons behind increases or decreases in cases of disease.
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ANNA KALBARCZYK: Collecting and analyzing data about diseases and about the effectiveness of disease control programs can be hugely powerful tools for population health. We hope this course has given you helpful ideas and strategies to try out as you collect and analyze data in your own work.

Thank you for joining us for Collecting and Using Data for Disease Control and Global Health Decision-making.

As we bring this course to a close, let’s take a quick look at some of the issues and topics we covered over the last 3 weeks as we explored the lessons learned from the extraordinary global effort to eradicate polio.

Narrated by your course instructors, Olakunle Alonge, Svea Closser, Anna Kalbarczyk, and Aditi Rao, the video depicts key moments of global activities captured by the thousands of workers and volunteers of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.

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Are you interested in learning more? This course is one of three, covering different aspects of the polio eradication initiative. You may find the other two courses of interest:

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