**4. Conclusions**

CRVS-based mortality datasets, including Australia's NMD, are important epidemiological datasets that have guided health policy and planning for many years. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of rapid reporting of CRVS-based mortality data to complement data collected through surveillance systems and provide insights into the broader impacts of the pandemic beyond deaths directly from the virus.

Work undertaken in Australia to provide rapid data during the pandemic highlighted systemwide limitations that narrowed the scope of reported data. In particular, reporting needed to be sufficiently lagged to enable meaningful interpretation of changes in mortality, and only doctor-certified deaths could be included in reports. This limited the types of policy questions that could be addressed through rapid reporting to those concerning deaths from natural causes.

In Australia, electronic foundations already exist within the CRVS system with additional electronic components being developed and implemented by jurisdictional RBDMs. The electronic transformation of the CRVS system is expanding opportunities, with eM-CCDs, ICD-11 and next-generation auto-coding tools likely to streamline future data collection, processing and reporting.

While COVID-19 has provided a catalyst for innovation and set clear new requirements for CRVS-based mortality datasets, the potential uses of rapid mortality data extend well beyond the pandemic. Rapid data will be able to provide early indications of changes in patterns of mortality relating to any number of events that could impact population health, including natural disasters, changes in natural cause patterns of mortality or infectiousdisease-related epidemics.

**Author Contributions:** Writing—original draft preparation, J.E.-H., L.M.; writing—review and editing, J.E.-H., L.M. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** Not applicable.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
