Though numbers alone may be insufficient to capture the nuances of population health, they provide a common language of appraisal and furnish clear evidence of disparities and inequalities. Over the past 30 years, facilitated by high speed computing and electronics, considerable investment has been made in the collection and analysis of urban health indicators, environmental indicators, and met...

The aim of this paper is to propose methods that incorporate equity concerns into cost utility analysis. The focus of the paper is on QALYs, but the results apply to health utility indices in general. Two interpretations of QALYs are considered: QALYs as (von Neumann Morgenstern) utilities and QALYs as measures of health. A justification is provided for aggregating consistently scaled "QALYs as...

H eart disease is currently the leading cause of death in the world. 1 It is estimated that greater than a third of the population in the United States has at least 1 type of cardiovascular disease. 2 Although its clinical manifestations typically emerge in middle age, the atherosclerotic process begins in childhood. 3 Proatherosclerotic fatty streaks and raised lesions, which are deposits of c...

Health status can be an important outcome in studies on patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD). In these studies, adjustment for prognostic factors, such as comorbidity, often has to be made. None of the comorbidity indices that are commonly used in research on ESRD patients has been validated for studies on health status. This study evaluated three existing indices (Khan, Davies, and Cha...

Objectives The accurate measurement of geographic patterns of health care utilization is a prerequisite for the study of geographic variations in health care utilization. While several measures have been developed to measure how accurately geographic units reflect the health care utilization patterns of residents, they have been only applied to hospitalization and need further evaluation. This ...

background: households’ financial protection against health payments and expenditures and equity in utilization of health care services are of the most important tasks of governments. this study aims to measuring equity in household’s health care payments according to fairness in financial contribution (ffc) and kakwani indices in tehran-iran, 2013. methods: this cross-sectional study was condu...

OBJECTIVE To better understand the combined influence of employee engagement, health behavior, and physical health on job performance and absenteeism. METHODS Analyses were based on 20,114 employees who completed the Healthways Well-Being Assessment from 2008 to 2010. Employees represented three geographically dispersed companies in the United States. RESULTS Employee engagement, health beh...