Health productivity

Health productivity measures health associated outcomes (metrics) against resources (usually money) employed. So health productivity in a country might be best measured as a health metric versus (corrected) gross national product.

Life-expectancy against healthcare spend is not a measure of health productivity, but rather health-care productivity.

It is different from health-care productivity as a measure of health in a population such as life expectancy depends also upon a cultures prioritisation in fields as diverse as education, infrastructure and reduction in addressable social inequalities. Societies should generally be more interested in health productivity. Individuals may be more interested in health-care productivity once they have an illness. The same incremental public health-care intervention such as safer water supply may result a significant impact on health productivity in a third world country, but not a first world country. On the other hand investing in primary-PCI will almost certainly make no useful impact on either health productivity or health-care productivity metrics for the whole population in a third world country but may well to do for a small segment of that countries population or for the whole population of a first world country.

Some of the most irreconcilable debates on health or health-care productivity can be objectively analysed as debates based on different value systems. For example a health-care productivity metric that utilised complication rates of therapeutic abortion is rather likely to be subjectively interpreted in some value systems. However all possible metrics come with differential value in different value systems.

External link

See International Health Care Systems — Selected Measures NEJM Interactive graphic WARNING Flash content^[1]

References