UW’s Institute for Health Metrics goes local
The world spends trillions of dollars each year on health care. Yet there is little information available on how that money is spent and how effectively it is used, making it difficult for policy makers to determine how scarce resources might be better deployed. There simply has been a dearth of comprehensive, concrete data.
The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) was launched four years ago to help fill that data vacuum. With long-term funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, IHME strives to be an independent, objective statistician providing data that can be used to promote better global health policy. Unique in its capabilities for community-level data collection and analysis, it has emerged as an important contributor to Seattle’s expertise in global health and has already shattered long-established beliefs about issues such as maternal mortality.
Now, IHME has the chance to show how its expertise can improve our understanding of health care here at home. Researchers have launched a new study of King County with the goal of shedding light on how to better manage chronic conditions and reduce the health care costs that have placed an increasingly heavy burden on taxpayers and employers.
The study, a collaboration among IHME, Public Health–Seattle & King County, Harvard University and Dartmouth College, will focus on King County residents who have chronic conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure. Ideally, the results will provide the basis for policy initiatives that could improve health outcomes while substantially cutting health care spending. By looking across demographics, says David Fleming, director of Public Health–Seattle & King County and a principal investigator in the study, researchers hope to understand “where that next dollar in investment in prevention needs to go.”
It’s not just a question of where the money should be spent, but also how it can be spent most effectively. Health care providers must optimize the outcomes of everything from prevention to treatment at the lowest cost, says IHME professor Ali Mokdad, another principal investigator. Moreover, Mokdad adds, the goal is to determine “what works in certain communities, [and] what doesn’t work.”
The issue is particularly important to the business sector because of the sharply rising cost of health care. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that more than 75 percent of the nation’s $2 trillion annual expenditures on health care goes to treat Americans with chronic conditions. Because individuals with
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