The utility approach to assessing population health

There are two key components to constructing summary measures of population health quality: a health-status classification system and a valuation function. The former was discussed in part 7. My remarks on that session are also relevant here (see chapter 7.2). The latter will be the focus of my brief remarks here. I will concentrate on three major topics: a conceptual foundation that supports a measure with interval-scale properties, key issues in the elicitation of preferences for health states, and the estimation of valuation functions, including the choice of functional form for preference functions and implications for the design of preference elicitation surveys. In a sense the first two topics are about getting the dependent variable, the left-hand side of the estimating equation, correct, while the third topic is about getting the independent variables, the right-hand side variables, correct.