Workers' Compensation: Measuring the Global Burden of Disease

Thursday, August 29, 2013

Measuring the Global Burden of Disease

Today's post was shared by NEJM and comes from www.nejm.org

It is difficult to deliver effective and high-quality care to patients without knowing their diagnoses; likewise, for health systems to be effective, it is necessary to understand the key challenges in efforts to improve population health and how these challenges are changing. Before the early 1990s, there was no comprehensive and internally consistent source of information on the global burden of diseases, injuries, and risk factors. To close this gap, the World Bank and the World Health Organization launched the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) Study in 1991.

Although assessments of selected diseases, injuries, and risk factors in selected populations are published each year (e.g., the annual assessments of the human immunodeficiency virus [HIV] epidemic, the only comprehensive assessments of the state of health in the world have been the various revisions of the GBD Study for 1990, 1999–2002, and 2004.

The advantage of the GBD approach is that consistent methods are applied to critically appraise available information on each condition, make this information comparable and systematic, estimate results from countries with incomplete data, and report on the burden of disease with the use of standardized metrics.

The most recent assessment of the global burden...

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