Dashboards of health indicators

This chapter presents, for the first time, a set of dashboards which are designed to shed light on how well OECD countries do in promoting the health of their population and improving their health system performance. These dashboards do not have the ambition of identifying which countries have the best health system overall. They summarise some of the relative strengths and weaknesses of countries on a selected set of indicators on health and health system performance, to help identify possible priority areas for actions. These dashboards, which take the form of summary tables, highlight how well OECD countries are doing along five dimensions: 1) health status 2) risk factors to health 3) access to care 4) quality of care and 5) health care resources. For each of these five dimensions, a selected set of key indicators are presented. The selection of these indicators is based on three main criteria: 1) policy relevance 2) data availability and 3) data interpretability (i.e., no ambiguity that a higher/lower value means a better/worse performance). There is, however, one exception to the application of this third criterion: for the fifth dashboard on health care resources, more health spending or more human or physical resources does not necessarily mean better performance. This is why the ranking of countries is displayed differently.