Outcomes

A central step in health system performance assessment is understanding to what extent a health system meets its goals, and this can be done through assessing outcomes. Among the key outcomes (i.e. health system goals) are health improvement, responsiveness or people-centredness, and financial protection.

Further goals are health system efficiency and equity where equity typically encompasses some notion of the distribution of outcomes across different population groups, while efficiency represents maximizing the outputs using the inputs available. Moreover, there are such objectives as access, quality and coverage, which are frequently considered as intermediate objectives that are instrumental to the achievement of the above-mentioned health system goals.

Much of the European Observatory’s work involves understanding, measuring and using information on those various outcomes for health policy making.