ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies the types of health status indexes required for health planning and describes various methodological approaches employed to date to deal with two fundamental problems of measurement, namely, concept specification and scaling of indicators. Health planning involves several interrelated steps, each of which requires information about health status. The various uses of information about health in the planning process impose several demands on health status indexes which can be employed as criteria in evaluating them. The chapter also identifies four fundamental criteria for evaluating health status indexes. The first two pertain to the problem of concept specification, the third to scaling, and the fourth to practical problems of implementation and feasibility. The sheer number and diversity of health status indicators in the literature precludes an exhaustive survey of their relative merits. Most attempts to devise health status indexes based on clinical data have been confined to single diseases and, therefore, lack generality.
