Making sense of health rankings

In an era of increasingly complex medical care and escalating costs, healthcare decision-makers often rely on a broad range of indicators to gauge the health of a population, the quality of hospital care and the performance of healthcare systems. Reports that rank the health of Canadians and Canada's healthcare systems according to these indicators are widely cited in the media. These reports attempt to condense a complicated array of statistics into a relatively simple number, a rank that is used to make international and provincial comparisons. These reports have often been inconsistent. Unlike a familiar economic indicator - the gross domestic product (GDP), which represents a complex entity with a single number calculated according to an internationally agreed-upon methodology - rankings of health and healthcare are not yet standardized or well understood. This article aims to improve readers' understanding of ranking reports. It outlines the components and processes that underlie health rankings and explores why such rankings can be difficult to interpret.