New indicator for measuring the performance of the Hungarian health system: Healthcare Access and Quality Index

Abstract

The Global Burden of Disease Study recently published the results of its performance analysis on the health care access and qualityin 195 countries including Hungary. To assess the performance of the health systems a new index based on preventable and amenable mortality corrected to different factors was applied. The Hungarian health system is on the 40th place in the global list developed on the basis of this index. There is a great space to improve the performance in prevention and care of diseases of the cardiovascular system and cancers in Hungary. Beyond restructuring the health system in Hungary with the main focus on primary prevention, the analysis provided additional pieces of evidences, namely the increase of the health expenditure and the decrease of the portion of the out-of-pocket expenditure would also help to improve the performance of the health system.