Data Mining and Public Health Surveillance

ABSTRACT

The ability to observe current trends in health information and predict the future health status of a country is an important goal of health service institutions. Health information systems are used to accumulate, validate and examine data in order to provide information which is used in the formation of health policies. The fast growth and integration of databases means health scientists now have a huge resource that can be studied to make inferences and reveal valuable trends. Developing countries like Ghana often lack such systems, with high cost of software and IT infrastructure being the major issues. However, due to its low hardware requirements, an open-source system like DHIS2 solves these problems. There is also the need to develop systems which simulate the human thought process and data mining is one element of this stimulating area of adaptive behaviour and machine learning. The main research objective of this thesis is to examine how medical data are being used currently and explore better ways of analyzing them to deliver an improved quality of health service.