Two years into the post-COVID reset of the Directorate General of Health Services' surveillance pipeline, additional director-general Dr. Mahbubur Rahman sat down with BHRF for a long-form interview at the DGHS headquarters in Mohakhali. The conversation, edited for clarity and length, ranged from why the country still does not have a unified hospital-admissions registry to whether the next outbreak — whatever it turns out to be — will be visible early enough.
BHRF: What is the single biggest gap in the surveillance system today?
Dr. Rahman: Real-time hospital admissions across both public and private. We have a daily snapshot for some categories — dengue, malaria, COVID — but we do not yet have a single, public, line-listed feed that tells us, on any given day, how many patients are being admitted with respiratory illness across the country. That is the first thing I would want to fix.
BHRF: Why does the private sector not feed in?
Dr. Rahman: Partly historical, partly regulatory, partly because the data templates we send out do not actually fit the way private hospitals run their EMRs. We are working on a thinner, machine-readable feed that any hospital can submit — basically a JSON envelope with five or six fields. The barrier has been making it lightweight enough that compliance is realistic.
BHRF: When do you expect that to be live?
Dr. Rahman: I do not want to give a date until the pilot in three private hospitals in Dhaka is closing the loop reliably. We are close. I would say within twelve months. If it is not live within twelve months, I think the country has a right to ask why.
The full interview, which also covers vaccine cold chain, climate-driven disease, and the DGHS' relationship with WHO Bangladesh, is on the BHRF longread shelf.
