Sentinel health events as indicators of unmet needs.

It is vitally important to be able to assess the impact of the health care system on the populations it serves. This paper explores whether sentinel health events--negative health states, such as death, disability, and disease, that might have been avoided given current medical and public health knowledge and technology--can be used as sociomedical indicators to assess levels of unmet needs and to evaluate health system performance. Using hospital discharge data, the occurrence of sentinel health events in New York State and differences among population subgroups are examined. Among hospitalized residents of New York State in 1983, more than 17,000 deaths occurred that were possibly avoidable. More than 336,000 instances of disease were found that were potentially preventable. Significantly higher rates and ratios for many sentinel events were found among blacks, Medicaid recipients, and users of public hospitals than were found for comparison groups. The sentinel events approach proved to be useful and practical. However, refinements and adaptations of the sentinel events method are needed, including the development of one or more smaller sets of indicators--tracer sentinel events--that can be used to profile aspects of health status and the health system.