Abstract
Valid, reliable and comparable measures of the health states of individuals and of the health status of populations are critical components of the evidence base for health policy. We need to develop population health measurement strategies that coherently address the relationships between epidemiological measures (such as risk exposures, incidence, and mortality rates) and multi-domain measures of population health status, while ensuring validity and cross-population comparability.Studies reporting on descriptive epidemiology of major diseases, injuries and risk factors, and on the measurement of health at the population level – either for monitoring trends in health levels or inequalities or for measuring broad outcomes of health systems and social interventions – are not well-represented in traditional epidemiology journals, which tend to concentrate on causal studies and on quasi-experimental design. In particular, key methodological issues relating to the clear conceptualisation of, and the validity and comparability of measures of population health are currently not addressed coherently by any discipline, and cross-disciplinary debate is fragmented and often conducted in mutually incomprehensible language or paradigms. Population health measurement potentially bridges a range of currently disjoint fields of inquiry relating to health: biology, demography, epidemiology, health economics, and broader social science disciplines relevant to assessment of health determinants, health state valuations and health inequalities.This new journal will focus on the importance of a population based approach to measurement as a way to characterize the complexity of people's health, the diseases and risks that affect it, its distribution, and its valuation, and will attempt to provide a forum for innovative work and debate that bridge the many fields of inquiry relevant to population health in order to contribute to the development of valid and comparable methods for the measurement of population health and its determinants.
Highlights
Measurement of population health, its causes, and its dis- for health policies [1], and for the evaluation and plan
Multidimensional phenomenon, and efforts to characterize and measure population health have generated a vast array of metrics and indicators, covering mortality, physiological measurements, clinical disease and impairment states, health states characterised in terms of functions or capacities in multiple domains, disability, handicap, quality of life and well-being
This approach rapidly becomes unwieldy when a number of problems are being monitored and we want to make comparisons over time, across population groups, or before and after some health intervention. It is not clear how event rates and event counts should relate to health states in individuals and populations, and there is not general agreement as to whether event rates and counts should be seen as health measures or as determinants or causes of population health, defined in terms of health states and mortality risks
Summary
Population health metrics: crucial inputs to the development of evidence for health policy. Address: 1Epidemiology and Burden of Disease, World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland, 2Evidence and Information for Policy, World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland and 3Risk, Resource, and Environmental Management Division, Resources for the Future, Washington DC, USA
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