First Tuberculosis-Focused Data Fellowship Program Helps TB Staff from Five Countries
First Tuberculosis-Focused Data Fellowship Program Helps TB Staff from Five Countries
This story was originally published on systemone.id.
SystemOne LLC, (Springfield, MA), Management Sciences for Health (MSH) (Medford, MA) and the Tableau Foundation (Seattle, WA) recently concluded the first Data Fellowship Program for TB staff from the National TB programs and Ministries of Health. Eight participants from five participating countries attended the week-long training session in Johannesburg, using their own country’s GxAlert diagnostic data to uncover ways to improve healthcare delivery and patient impact.
“The TB Data Fellowship training is a breakthrough initiative to show the impact of data for developing effective and efficient control programs to end TB,” said Sarder Tanzir Hossain, Senior Technical Advisor, TB laboratories in Bangladesh.
“Tableau Desktop visualization has helped me to generate graphical presentations that have meaningful programmatic ‘stories’ to help drive and inform policy both at the program and ministry level,” said Lawrence Kachule, National GeneXpert Coordinator, NTP, MoH, Malawi.
The Data Fellowship Program continues a year beyond this intensive first week, and will cover further training on how to analyze, visualize and understand data collected through GxAlert. The additional mentorship will be conducted remotely and will focus on continuing skills development and sharing of best practices.
“Even though this was only the start of the program, by the end of the week, participants were able to begin exploring their own country data and developing visuals to improve the understanding and reporting for their TB program” said Natasha Gous, Medical Science Liaison and Facilitator of the TB Data Fellowship Program.