1 - Health Status Measures, Policy, and Biomedical Research

Abstract

This chapter reviews the rapidly expanding literature on alternative measures of health status with regard to their public policy usefulness. Taxonomy is developed to determine how each health status index may be used for specific resource allocation decisions in the health sector. The chapter discusses that the measurement of health status is described in terms of several important related tasks: (a) defining a set of health states that describe the array of conditions prevalent in the population, (b) incorporating prognosis and its duration into the overall construct, (c) developing a set of weights to reflect the relative scale of health states, and (d) integrating mortality and other indicators into a health status indicator, a composite index or indexes. Various health status measures have been used as effective criteria in the evaluation of health services and biomedical advances, including mortality, disease incidence rate, and bed-disability. Moreover, health status measures per se do not constitute an effective criterion; only the difference among health status measures attributable to a specific service or advance can be properly identified as an effectiveness measure.