On Mar. 15, 2018, the University of Washington School of Medicine announced the establishment of the world’s first academic department devoted to the science of health metrics. The new Department of Health Metrics Sciences will have a focused interest in using high-quality information to measure population health, its determinants, and the performance of health systems.

Approved by the University of Washington Board of Regents at its March 8 meeting, the department will take an interdisciplinary approach to measuring and understanding the elements that affect health here in the United States and worldwide. Epidemiology, demography, statistics, computer science, and economics are examples of the disciplines that will be key contributors to the department’s work.

The department is expected to develop broad collaborations across the School of Medicine, School of Public Health, other health sciences schools and related disciplines based in other schools and colleges.

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), which has been administratively based in UW Medicine since 2007 when a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant helped establish the institute, will work closely with the new Department of Health Metrics Sciences and have faculty based in it. In 2017, the Gates Foundation gave an additional $279 million to continue the work of IHME over the next decade.

IHME is best-known for being the coordinating center of the Global Burden of Disease study, which provides a comprehensive picture of what disables and kills people across countries, time, age, and sex. The study helps to quantify health loss from hundreds of diseases, injuries, and risk factors so that health systems can be improved and disparities can be eliminated.