Critical information on population health is needed to inform planning, resource allocation, program implementation, monitoring, and evaluation.One of the key descriptors of a population's health is information about causes of death.Since many countries lack complete vital registration systems with medical certification of deaths, cause of death information is often missing.Verbal autopsy (VA) can be used to determine individuals' causes of death and cause-specific mortality fractions in populations without a complete vital registration system.A standard VA instrument paired with easy-to-implement and reliable analytic methods could help bridge significant gaps in information about causes of death, particularly in resource-poor settings.A great deal of research has been conducted in the past several decades about VA and its application in the field, particularly in research settings, but some traditional methods of implementation and analysis can be costly, time-consuming, and potentially of varying quality.Verbal autopsies can now be analyzed using a much wider array of innovative techniques, most of which will be less expensive and yield higher quality results than current practice.What has been missing from the field of verbal autopsy is a collection of the most up-to-date research to help decision-makers choose the best and most cost-effective VA techniques to identify causes of death in their populations.This thematic series of Population Health Metrics, "Verbal autopsy:
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Murray et al. (2011) studied this question.