Health administration: from provision to the assessment of outcomes

The "health policy and administration" area has generated enormous interest in recent decades. This is the result of several factors. First, there has been a substantial increase in health expenditure Secondly, the significant increase in the health status of populations worldwide has motivated "policy makers", academics, analysts and also the "media" to discuss health issues as key subjects with the intent to understand further the very complex healthcare process. However it is difficult to quantify such improvements even though health costs and other financial data are often discussed. There is a a paucity of reliable data regarding outcomes (ie the impact of health care on the population's health) and so-called "health gains",despite the fact that these are major goals for any health system. Thus, it is difficult to relate the rise in heath care costs to the improvement in outcomes and hence develop a balanced view of the performance of the sector.. Therefore it is urgent to develop explicit, valuable and useful assessment models, in order to validate the provision efficiency and the effectiveness of achieved outcomes. This study intends to contribute to this issue, through identifying a useful indicator that can be used objectively to describe "health gains" , in order to assess a heath system's performance. It will not be another outputs measure but rather it is aimed at solving long-standing problems. It looks to support the relation between expended resources and achieved outcomes and to detect changes and show differences.