An Analysis of the Problems for Health Data Integration in Bangladesh

Discovering the hidden knowledge from different health data repositories requires the integration of health data from widely diversified sources. While integration, maintaining record linkage is a critical research issue for developing countries such as Bangladesh. Researchers have given different solutions to this problem that are applicable for developed countries where electronic health record of patients are maintained with identifiers like social security number (SSN), Universal Patient Identifier (UPI), etc. These algorithms cannot be used for integrating health data in Bangladesh because of many missing data, different ID used for the same patient in same or different systems and high amount of noise in other patient information. In this paper, we have defined the constraining factors of healthcare date available in Bangladesh and other developing countries. We have analyzed the practical problems of collecting and integrating healthcare data in Bangladesh to build up its National Health Data Warehouse (NHDW). We have also provided some important recommendations to boost the integration process and also to support record linkage.