Is health measurable?
I’m not sure.
Diseases are measurable, at least in a binary fashion. You either do or don’t have a disease.
In addition, often diseases can be quantified in a non-binary fashion, with internal, fine-grained measurements. For example, someone may be HIV+ with a certain viral load or have hypertension with a set of average systolic and diastolic pressures, or heart failure with a given ejection fraction.
There are also various measurements for something we refer to as “fitness” which can include measurements of cardiorespiratory capacity such as VO2max and muscular endurance tests, or maybe (but this is not without controversy), body composition. We might even numerically estimate fitness by looking at a specific sports result—such as a 5K time—which might be a good proxy-measure of physical fitness (mixed in with training and perhaps mental fitness – whatever that is!).
But what about “health”?
For example, consider the World Health Organization’s definition of health (just one of the many definitions of health being floated out there today):
Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
How in the world do you measure that?
We can’t.
And that’s the point.
I don’t think we ( or your healthcare organizations) can measure health—either individually or at a population level—without first defining what health is (and even then, it may still not be possible to measure it), and this is a problem because this is a time when the healthcare industry is currently enthralled by data.
It’s a time when healthcare administrators see electronic health records and big data and insights gained from artificial intelligence (and all of the other technologies like these) as the saviors of healthcare, it’s unlikely we really know how any of these measurements and data-sets relate to health because I am not sure most people working in healthcare have a clear definition of health, let alone a measurable one.
So are diseases measurable? Probably. But is health measurable? No.
And if that’s the case—if they (and we) can’t even define the central word of their (our) industry, let alone measure it—then as they (we) inevitably expand data measurement, extraction, and interpretation, everyone can expect a rough ride.