State Health Index: NITI Aayog

In News 

• Recently, NITI Aayog released the fourth edition of the State Health Index for 2019–20.
  • The report, titled “Healthy States, Progressive India”.

About State Health Index

• It is an annual tool to assess the performance of states and Union Territories(UTs) and has been compiled and published since 2017. 
• It ranks states and Union Territories on their year-on-year incremental performance in health outcomes as well as their overall status.
• It has been developed by NITI Aayog, with technical assistance from the World Bank, and in close consultation with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW).
• Domains: It is a weighted composite index based on 24 indicators grouped under the domains of ‘Health Outcomes’, ‘Governance and Information’, and ‘Key Inputs/Processes’. 
  • Each domain has been assigned weights based on its importance with the higher scores for outcome indicators.
    • Health outcomes, for instance, includes parameters such as neonatal mortality rate, under-5 mortality rate, the sex ratio at birth.
    •  Governance includes parameters such as institutional deliveries, average occupancy of senior officers in key posts earmarked for health. 
    • The‘ key inputs’ domain consists of the proportion of shortfall in health care providers to what is recommended, functional medical facilities, birth and death registration and tuberculosis treatment success rate.
• Aims: To nudge states/UTs towards building robust health systems and improving service delivery.
  • This has been instrumental in shifting the focus from budget spending and inputs to outputs and outcomes. 

Major Findings 

• The ranking is categorized as ‘The Larger States’, ‘Smaller States’ and ‘Union Territories’ to ensure comparison among similar entities.
  • Among the ‘Larger States’, in terms of annual incremental performance, Uttar Pradesh, Assam and Telangana are the top three ranking states.
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Image Courtesy: PIB

• Among ‘Smaller States’, Mizoram and Meghalaya registered the maximum annual incremental progress.

Image Courtesy: PIB

• Among UTs, Delhi, followed by Jammu and Kashmir, showed the best incremental performance.

Image Courtesy: PIB

Overall Ranking: 

• On overall ranking based on the composite index score in 2019–20, the top-ranking states were Kerala and Tamil Nadu among the ‘Larger States’, Mizoram and Tripura among the ‘Smaller States’, and DH&DD and Chandigarh among the UTs.

Image Courtesy: TH

• The several States are significantly better in one domain suggesting that there was scope to improve their performance in the other domains with specific targeted interventions. 
  • For instance, 47% of States showed the highest performance in health outcomes and governance and information domains and only one State showed the highest performance in the key inputs and processes domain.

• Most significant progress
  • It was observed in Assam as it improved its ranking by three positions, from 15 to 12.
• Steepest decline
  • Odisha had the steepest decline of two positions, while the ranking of Andhra Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka and Uttarakhand declined by one position each.

Source: TH