healthadjusted

Healthadjusted is a term used in public health and health economics to describe measurements that incorporate health status into traditional demographic or economic metrics. It is most often associated with metrics that adjust life expectancy or similar outcomes to reflect the quality or burden of health states, rather than merely counting years lived. In practice, healthadjusted measures include the concept of health-adjusted life expectancy (HALE) and health-adjusted life years (HALYs).

Healthadjusted metrics aim to capture not only how long people live but how well they live during those years. They typically combine mortality data with information about morbidity or functional status. Popular examples include quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), which are used to evaluate health interventions by estimating gains in healthy life or losses due to disease.

QALYs assess the value of health outcomes by weighting years of life with a quality-of-life score, whereas DALYs measure the burden of disease as years lived with disability plus years of life lost due to premature death. HALYs provide a broader framework that can encompass both approaches and serve as a common unit for comparing health impacts across diseases and interventions.

Applications of healthadjusted metrics include cost-effectiveness analysis, prioritization of health interventions, and burden-of-disease assessments used by national health authorities and international organizations. Limitations involve subjectivity in assigning health-state weights, cultural and ethical differences in valuation, and methodological debates about aggregation and distributional fairness. See also QALY, DALY, and HALE for related concepts.