Information on the economic effect of poor population health is needed to engage the business community in population health improvement. In a competitive global market, the United States has high health care costs and poor outcomes (measured by such factors as healthy and productive lives) compared with other countries. US business needs to understand population health and not focus just on th...

Several recent studies have made the provocative claim that income inequality is an important determinant of population health. The primary evidence for this hypothesis is the repeated finding--across countries and across U.S. states--that there is an association between income inequality and aggregate health outcomes. However, most of these studies examine only a single cross section of data a...

BACKGROUND Community health interventions are increasingly employing partnerships combined with multilevel intervention models to achieve their objectives. Resources and methods for project evaluation are often limited to changes in population health status or health behaviors, while broader contextual questions that may illuminate mechanisms for change across ecological levels and project sust...

The majority of the world's population will live in cities in the next few years and the pace of urbanization worldwide will continue to accelerate over the coming decades. While the number of megacities is projected to increase, the largest population growth is expected to be in cities of less than one million people. Such a dramatic demographic shift can be expected to have an impact on popul...

In the past decade, interest has been rising in the development, calculation and use of summary measures of population health, which combine information on mortality and non-fatal health outcomes. This paper reviews the issues and challenges in the design and application of summary measures and presents a framework for evaluating different alternatives. Summary measures have a variety of uses, ...

iran’s significant success in implementing family planning (fp) during the past 25 years, has made it a role model in the world. the total fertility rate (tfr) in iran has dropped from 6.5 in 1960 to 1.6 in 2012, which is well below the targeted value of 2.2 for the country. iran’s success story, however, did not merely root in the implementation of fp programs. in other words, families’ strong...