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The purpose of the CHCI is to provide a comparative evaluation of healthcare-system performance in the ten Canadian provinces from the perspective of the consumer. The CHCI seeks to measure the consumer-friendliness of each province’s healthcare system—that is to say the extent to which it meets the needs and demands of the people who rely on it.

 

The CHCI evaluates the consumer-friendliness of each provincial healthcare system across five dimensions—Patient Access to Information and Information Technology Development, Primary Care and Problem Prevention, Wait Times, Patient Outcomes and Range and Reach of Services and access to new medicines. For each category, a number of indicators are examined to determine the extent to which each province’s healthcare system is achieving results that benefit the consumer.

 

The CHCI places a particularly strong emphasis on two specific dimensions of consumer-friendliness: patient wait times and patient outcomes. We seek to help citizens and patients better understand the extent to which their province is delivering timely, effective care in comparison to other Canadian jurisdictions.

The purpose of the ECHCI is to provide an evaluation of healthcare system performance from the perspective of the consumer. In many areas of public policy, healthcare included, performance evaluation is often based on the measurement of inputs and certain types of easily measurable outputs that do not necessarily reflect the effectiveness of the relevant program or policy. Counting resource inputs such as hospital beds and doctors per capita does not tell us very much about the care that consumers actually receive; the amount of time the average person has to wait for an MRI is a much better indicator of healthcare quality than the number of MRI machines in a particular country.

 

Instead of measuring inputs, such as spending levels and resources used, this index attempts to measure outcomes from the perspective of the consumer. The ECHCI seeks to measure the consumer friendliness of each national healthcare system and should not be interpreted as an attempt to identify the “best” healthcare system.