Healthy-Time Measures of Health Outcomes and Healthcare Quality

The purposes of this paper are to describe some conceptual and empirical foundations of "healthy-time" measures of health outcomes or healthcare quality, and to explore how to expand the empirical opportunities for measuring such outcomes using U.S. national survey data. To these ends, the paper provides an overview of Grossman's seminal health production framework, surveys some of the healthy-time outcome/quality measures in use across a variety of contexts and applications, explores how data from the U.S. Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) might be used to develop ongoing healthy-time measures for U.S. samples, describes an econometric strategy for studying such outcomes, and presents estimates of regression models describing two sets of healthy-time outcome measures obtained from 2011 and 2012 MEPS data.