MULTIATTRIBUTE HEALTH-STATUS CLASSIFICATION SYSTEMS - HEALTH UTILITIES INDEX

In this article, multi-attribute approaches to the assessment of healt h status are reviewed with a special focus on 2 recently developed sys tems, the Health Utilities Index (HUI) Mark II and Mark III systems. T he Mark LI system consists of 7 attributes: sensation, mobility, emoti on, cognition, self-care, pain and fertility. The Mark III system cont ains 8 attributes: vision, hearing, speech, ambulation, dexterity, emo tion, cognition and pain. Each attribute consists of multiple levels o f functioning. A combination of levels across the attributes constitut es a health state. The HUI systems are deliberately focused on the fun damental core attributes of health status, and on the capacity of indi viduals to function with respect to these attributes. Thus, the measur e obtained constitutes a pure description of health status, uncontamin ated by differential opportunity or preference. Multi-attribute system s provide a compact but comprehensive framework for describing health status for use in population health and programme evaluation studies. An important advantage of such systems is their ability to simultaneou sly provide detail on an attribute-by-attribute basis and to capture c ombinations of deficits among attributes, An additional advantage is t heir compatibility with multi-attribute preference functions, which pr ovide a method for computing a summary health-related quality-of-life score for each health state.