Evaluation And Comparison Of National Statistical Indicators For Health System Performance

The themes of WHO yearly reports almost focus on the matter of population health. In 2000, improve the performance of a health system was taken as the topic of the yearly report. Further more, in this year, WHO first time gave a rank for the all membership countries from the perspective of healthcare performance. China lied rearward in this ranking procedure in single or comprehensive achievements. This result led to an argumentation across China. More remarkably, the issue of healthcare reform around this rank was getting much more heated. In some sense, evaluating health system performance and the quality of health service might be able to find out some deep-rooted problems when population health is to be assessed.Even without ranking, the fact is that, there is, in many aspects, a large gap between China'current health system performance and that of some developed countries. The study on healthcare performance has just begun in China. The reform on health Statistics Survey System is under way, and the new National Health Statistics Indicator System will alse reflect healthcare system performance. As for the study of national statistical indicators, especially for those of relating to performance, the UK and U.S have much more experience and developed a set of standard and rational method. Moreover, these two national health systems are exactly representatives of two major patterns of health system in the world, which the first is characterized by highly-welfare and the latter by social security. By comparative analysis of performance indicators of these two healthcare systems, this paper provided some ideas for the establishment and implementation of an evaluation indicator framework for China national healthcare system performance.A comparative analyse was used and a further discussion was provided in this paper. On the basis of National Health Statistics Indicator System, according to the experience of WHO, OECD and other countries, taking the different patterns of health systems of the U.S, U.K and China in to account, the author provided a systematic comparisons of the performance and its mearsurments of these three healthcare systems, and identified the differences: With regard to diseases, the U.S and U.K focus on chronic diseases, while China keeps an eye on infectious and endemic ones. The statistics of the U.S and U.K'is patient-centered, but that of China is health institution-centered. The ways of health indicator development of the U.S and U.K are more developed and canonical, and the the statistical indicators rely more on data produced from health activities. The indicators were also given benchmarks and target values. The development of indicator system for evoluation of China national health system performance is just at its starting point and the indicators available at present are based on reportings, for the adopt of information technology in China health domain remains to be further advanced compared with developed countries such the U.K and U.S. To sum up, the performance indicators of the U.K are good at assement of the equity of health service and that of the U.S pay more attention to healthcare quality. The performance indicators for China health system lags behind in both of the aspects and much more work remains to be done.