Summary Measures of Health Status
Summary measures of health status are statistics that use mortality data, or combine mortality and morbidity
data to represent overall population health in a single number.1 Examples of summary
measures include general health status and healthy days measures from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance
System (BRFSS) surveys, life expectancy, and years of potential life lost (YPLL). Measures that combine mortality
and morbidity include health-adjusted life years (HALYs) or health-adjusted life expectancy (HALE), quality-adjusted
life years (QALYs), years of healthy life (YHLs), and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs).
Bergner and Rothman 2 have suggested that health status assessment measures serve four
different functions, including examination of the health of general populations, clinical interventions
and their effects, changes in the health care delivery system, and health promotion activities and their
effects.
2.
Bergner, M, and Rothman, ML . Health Status Measures: An Overview and Guide for Selection.
Annual Review of Public Health 8: 191-210, 1987.
As cited in Marilyn J. Field and Marthe R. Gold (Eds.) Summarizing Population Health: Directions
for the Development and Application of Population Metrics, Committee on Summary Measures of Population
Health. Institute of Medicine. Washington D.C., National Academy Press. 1998.
Downloaded from http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=6124 on 2/10/2015
A description of Life Expectancy calculation may be found on the
Life Expectancy resource page in NM-IBIS.
These links will run the query and take you to the results page. To modify the query criteria,
you can use the top left ("MODIFY Query") navigation button on the query results page.
