A Framework for Multidimensional Assessment of Public Health Campaigns Reach
Time series analysis, Public health campaign, Public health.
Promoting awareness, increasing knowledge, encouraging the adoption of healthy attitudes and behaviors are some of the objectives of public health campaigns. However, to analyze the reach of a health campaign it is necessary to extend beyond epidemiological data, since this set, by itself, may not demonstrate the real magnitude of the results. It is necessary to discuss other data sources, variables of interest and dimensions that can be reached by the campaign. Furthermore, there are methodological challenges of measuring outcomes and establishing a causal relationship among interventions and pre- and post-periods, which includes research designs, quality measurement, and problems of evaluating outcomes. Thus, assessing the reach of a health campaign, in a multidimensional perspective through interrupted time series approach can be useful to guide the development of more effective campaigns in public health response. In this context, this thesis aims to propose a framework for multidimensional assessment of the reach of public health campaigns, exploring overlooked variables of interest that are possibly impacted by campaigns. This framework is supported by a software called Hermes, which is responsible to process the data in a complete data life cycle and show its results in a visual dashboard enabling decision makers to assess the effect over time before and after campaigns. To understand the current state of the art and guide the research in this domain, we performed a systematic literature review that explores the use of information technology approaches to analyze the impact of real public health campaigns. We summarized variables of interest, campaign data, techniques and tools employed to evaluate health campaigns. Then, we performed an analytical study in order to assess a real-world health campaign, named "Syphilis No!" launched in Brazil. This study describes the analysed data extracted from seven different data sources between 2015 and 2019, grouped by four dimensions: campaign, communication, education, and epidemiological surveillance. Data was processed and transformed by Hermes, using a time series approach, following the multidimensional analysis framework proposed. We plan to perform a third study applying regression analysis to complement the decomposition method already implemented. Our approach will provide, in statistical terms, support to compare how much an intervention changed an outcome of interest, immediately and over time. Our thesis results contribute to allow a more comprehensive assessment of the reach of public health campaigns and thus enable policy makers to re-analyze the awareness strategies developed to alert people about health care and behavioral changes, as well as better direct the use of funds and effort more effectively.