Better management of data could substantially raise vaccination rates, U.S. public health researchers say.

A group of researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health estimated that the coverage of vaccination around the world could be significantly improved by combining administrative data with survey data.

Justin Lessler, lead author of the study that aims to increase rates of immunization, said reliable estimates of vaccination coverage are key to managing infectious diseases.

Currently, the performance of immunization activities is measured only by the administrative method. This method, however, leads to inconsistencies, and does not record how many people are systematically missed by vaccination campaigns.

Comparing African countries, the researchers said that the size of the population never vaccinated was high 31 percent in Sierra Leone, 21 percent in Madagascar, and only 7 percent in Ghana. Yellow fever, polio, and Hepatitis A and B were among the vaccines studied.

To help bridge these discrepancies, Lessler collaborated with colleagues from Johns Hopkins, University of Oxford, Epicentre, and Princeton University.

The scientists developed a method for estimating the effective coverage of vaccination programs using cross-sectional surveys of vaccine coverage combined with administrative data. Using this method, they found that the estimates were lower for all three countries.

In addition, they found out that generally, estimates of routine coverage are lower than the World Health Organization and the United Nations Children's Fund.

Lessler said estimates of the inefficiency of past vaccination activities and the proportion not covered by any activity will give them more accurate predictions in the future, thereby giving them more insight.

According to the Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, disease prevention through vaccination is crucial to public health, adding that it is always better to prevent a disease than to treat it.