Toolkit - Application to calculate DALYs

Disease models (outcome trees) were created following a thorough literature review of the natural history disease progression pathway of the 117 different communicable diseases and six healthcare-associated outcome trees included in the project

This tool facilitates the complex calculation of DALYs by simply inputting age- gender- and population-specific incidence data and adjustment values for underestimation.

Composite health measures (CHM) are composite indicators allowing for quantitative assessments of health-related phenomena that cannot be directly measured. Several measures have been developed for this purpose based on different assumptions, models and parameters. One of the most common is the Disability Adjusted Life-Years (DALYs) that has been widely used for global comparisons of the overall impact of diseases.

Technical requirements

The BCoDE software toolkit is a 32-bit Windows application which can be run on Windows XP or later versions. It does not support other operating systems. Minimum hardware requirements are 1 GB of RAM, 1GHz CPU.

It does not require any additional software installed on the system. All the necessary libraries are included in the download package.

Users should update the virus definition database of their anti-virus software to avoid encountering issues when downloading the toolkit.

User information

Submission of the user information sheet is completely voluntary and is not a requirement for downloading the tool. It will only take a couple of minutes to complete. The sheet is aimed at getting feedback about the tool and helping it improve in the future. Specifically, knowing the users will help ECDC tailor its usability and send notifications about software updates.  

Download

The toolkit is distributed as a zip archive. Installation does not require any special user rights and can be performed by standard (non-admin) users. To install and run the toolkit, please follow the steps below:

1. Submit the short online user information sheet so we can send you emails when updates of the BCoDE toolkit are released.

2.  Download zip file Burden of communicable diseases toolkit, version 2.0.0, January 2020 Updated: January 2020

3. Unpack the zipped files. A new folder with name ‘BCoDE’ will appear

4. Go into the newly created folder and double-click on the file ‘BCoDE.exe’ to start using the toolkit.

5. The source code for this tool is also available as a zip archive and governed by the GNU General Pulblic License v.3.

Contents and data input

The toolkit includes two embedded tutorials, disease models describing the progression pathway of each disease (interactive visual outcome trees and text), input tables and several output visualisation options.

Necessary input data are the number of yearly cases, but all other parameters can also be edited. Outputs include disease-specific detailed information such as incidence, mortality, gender & demographics, acute vs. sequelae, YLL (Years of Life Lost) or YLD (Years Lived with Disability) and aggregate information (tables and graphs ranking the diseases).

Legal notice

This tool is a product of ECDC and is therefore subject to copyright and limited reproduction notices and rules related to personal data protection. For details, please see the legal notice: http://ecdc.europa.eu/en/legal-notice

Suggested citation

ECDC BCoDE toolkit [software application]. Version 1.7 Solna: European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control; 2019. Available from: https://ecdc.europa.eu/en/toolkit-application-calculate-dalys

Support

For comments, technical support and to report problems please contact: BCoDE@ecdc.europa.eu