ECHI

The ECHI (European Community Health Indicators) project was carried out in the framework of the Health Monitoring Programme and the Community Public Health Programme 2003-2008. The result is a list of 'indicators' for the public health field arranged according to a conceptual view on health and health determinants.

In general, the following criteria were applied in the selection of the indicators:

• Comprehensiveness: all aspects of the public health field should be covered.
• Meeting user needs: the set should cover the main priorities in public health policies of the Commission and the Member States.
• Being innovative: the set should not just be data-driven, but also indicate development needs.
• Using earlier work: the efforts of international institutions with Eurostat and other Commission Services as main providers, but also OECD and the WHO-Europe, in defining indicators and standard variables have been taken on board as much as possible.
• Using Health Monitoring Programme and Public Health Programme results: the results of projects should be included in the data where appropriate.
  

Indicators are at the crossroads of policy questions and data sets. Indicators reflect a policy interest as well as a selected set of possibilities in terms of what can be calculated. Therefore they will on one hand be justified from the policy side and on the other hand a short characterisation of the data source it's added.

The strategy on European Community Health Indicators (ECHI) (136 KB) has been summarised in a key document.

ICHI (International Compendium of Health Indicators) is a web-based application containing the health indicators used by WHO-Europe, OECD and Eurostat in their international databases. ICHI provides a selection of the most relevant indicator names and definitions as listed by these organisations. It also includes the complete list of health indicators developed by the ECHI project. All indicators are arranged following the ECHI taxonomy. The ECHI list and the ICHI website have been developed by the ECHI project (European Community Health Indicators, in two phases, 1998-2004) project, run under the EU Health Monitoring Programme. ICHI offers an easy entry to the indicator definitions used by the international organisations in their databases. This allows for a quick comparison between indicators and their definitions, in one coherent and structured system.

You can see the data of the First Set of ECHI indicators including 40 items. These data are readily available and are reasonably comparable (mostly based on assessment by Eurostat). For all indicators where this is considered useful or appropriate, stratification by gender and age is applied.