Life expectancy has long been used to gauge the overall health of national populations, but these figures only tell part of the story. For medical professionals in any area of healthcare, the key to tackling tomorrow's greatest challenges is to understand the mental and physical issues Americans face throughout their lives, and when they are most vulnerable to these conditions.

In a recent project chaired by researchers from Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts and the National Bureau of Economic Research, a team of academics have sought to establish a new measure for understanding the health of a population—a "quality-assured life expectancy."

A press release from the University of Massachusetts Medical School states that this term refers to the quality of life that people enjoy as they grow older, as indicated by their self-reported satisfaction and recorded medical symptoms.

We know that Americans are enjoying longer life spans now than they were decades past, but are those extra years spent battling medical impairments, or are we managing to lead richer, healthier lives as well? A July article from the Harvard Gazette reports that the researchers analyzed 90,000 responses to the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey that were submitted between 1991 and 2009. The results indicated that the period of time the average American spends in poor health has been dramatically compressed to the last few years of their life.

One of the lead researchers, Dr. Alison Rosen, noted that this ability to better understand health and well-being on a national scale could influence many aspects of health care in the years to come.

"Having a consistent measure of population health represents a major advance in our ability to measure the impact of health care reform on the health—not just the health care use—of all Americans," she explained.

In addition to helping assess the effectiveness of the Affordable Care Act, this calculation method may also shed light on how chiropractic EHR changes the medical landscape. The best chiropractic EHR has the potential to increase access to essential patient information while preserving their privacy, and can facilitate more effective care overall.