IHME hosts population health conference

The Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation is hosting a research conference on population health metrics and the future directions of this emerging field. The two-day event starts on April 10 and is co-sponsored by the Seattle, USA-based IHME and The Lancet.

"There's a lot of good work being doing out there, but it's being done by many groups who don't talk to each other...and who use different yardstcks to assess their efforts," IHME director Christopher Murray told local newspaper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Together with Alan Lopez, Dr Murray helped establish the landmark Global Burden of Disease methods and applications, a new metric that compared death and disability from various diseases and the contribution of risk factors to the overall burden of disease in developing and developed countries, helping to refine health care funding criteria. Although health spending accounts for 9% of world economic output, the IHME says there is a lack of objective, comparable and comprehensible information available to policymakers.