Title:	The Demography of Health and Health Care
Authors:	Louis G. Pol Richard K. Thomas
Keywords:	Health Care
Issue Date:	2001
Publisher:	Kluwer Academic
Description:	When health demography began to emerge as an applied subdiscipline within demography during the 1980s, few anticipated the developments that would occur in health care to influence its direction. While a distinct body of research categorized under this heading has yet to be formally recognized, the impact of health demography is clearly being felt in the field. The number of health professionals who are using the materials of health demography—perhaps without even realizing it—continues to grow. In fact, most of those involved with health demography are not demographers but sociologists, economists, epidemiologists, and health professionals who are applying the concepts and techniques of health demography to concrete problems in the delivery of health care. The boundaries of this subdiscipline are becoming increasingly visible within demography and the implications of health demography increasingly obvious outside of demography. The US health care system is poised, in fact, to enter the twenty-first century riding on the shoulders of health demography. Many factors have contributed to the emergence of this new field. The developments affecting the health care industry during the 1980s and 1990s have served to transform a diverse collection of charitable institutions and ‘‘mom-andpop’’ operations into an industry increasingly dominated by for-profit conglomerates. During the 1980s the industry became market driven and consumer oriented, resulting in an explosion in the demand for both demographic data and health statistics. The need to integrate and interpret data from these two fields has provided a major impetus for the development of health demography. At the same time, the significance of health demography has been confirmed through the reconceptualization of ‘‘health’’ and the growing emphasis on a population-based health care perspective. Now the revolutionary impact of managed care can be added to the list of developments that make the materials and methods of health demography invaluable to the health care industry.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/54524
ISBN:	0-306-47376-3
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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