Application of Social Choice Theory to Modify the Value Measure of Health Systems

Abstract

As a new composite indicator for capturing the value delivered by health systems of developing and developed economies, the Value Measure is the arithmetic average of access, satisfaction and efficiency, which are all made up of various components and scaled from 0 to 100. In light of the possibility of compensation associated with the arithmetic average, this paper proposes a new methodology to modify the Value Measure in a social choice framework. Specifically, we first take into account all possible individual preferences among access, satisfaction and efficiency; then calculate the pessimistic (worst case) and optimistic (best case) results, which are balanced by a “coefficient of optimism”; the CRITIC method is lastly employed to determine a set of common weights associated with individual preferences, for modifying the Value Measure released by Royal Philips. The superiority of proposed methodology is verified by means of computing and comparing Spearman’s rank correlation coefficients. The validity of our methodology is demonstrated using the data drawn from Future Health Index 2018.