Humanosphere: A new way to measure progress in global health
Sean McKee, policy translation specialist at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), discusses the Socio-Demographic Index (SDI), a new measure that compares health indicators with a country’s economic development status, that was launched with the results of IHME’s 2015 Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study. McKee writes, “By pairing this new analysis of development — the Socio-Demographic Index — with analyses of overall health and disease burden, the study’s authors hope that the metric will help identify the most successful efforts to improve health around the world. … This new [measure] adds to a growing arsenal of indexes that researchers are using to describe and gauge how we’re doing at making the world a healthier, safer, and more equitable place” (10/6).