An overview of the elemental and functional content of the health indicators system as an economic category

This paper summarizes the arguments and counterarguments within the scientific discussion on defining the essence of health as an economic category. Systematization of the scientific works to defining health as an economic category requires a clear formation and a detailed description of the health determinants. For achieving the research goal, the study was carried out in the following logical sequence: 1) defining the general research problem; 2) theoretical analysis on the relevant publications; 3) classifying the health determinants by item functioning content; 4) defining areas of public policy concerning the investigated issue; 5) determining the global changes due to COVID-19 impact. The methodological base of this study was the methods of systematization, comparison, structural analysis, logical generalization, and bibliometric analysis. The study involved the VOSviewer 1.6.15 software in visualizing the obtained results. The study sample consists of 610 documents indexed in the Scopus database from 2010 to May 2021. The paper presents the classification of the health determinants by the item functioning content as follows: 1) medical and demographic orientation determinants; 2) morbidity determinants, their composition, a list of the number of appeals to medical institutions, reports of medical examinations; 3) disability determinants; 4) determinants of physical development such as somatometric (average height, weight, chest volume, geometric shape of organs and body tissues), somatotopic (geometry of the spine, legs, arms, skeletal development, etc.), and psychometric (arm strength, respiratory rate, blood pressure, etc.); 5) determinants of natural population movement (births, deaths, natural population growth, life expectancy). The authors noted that quantitative determinants mentioned above allowed determining in detail and systematically the level of health as an economic category. The findings showed that the global COVID-19 pandemic changes the legislation support of health care. Besides, the healthcare guarantees program ensures transparent government support in the medical sector of Ukraine. The authors indicated that using an «Analytical panels» (dashboards) service on the website of the National Health Service allowed the analytical data processing on medical costs. The authors highlighted the improvement in healthcare institutions’ performance and financial transparency. The obtained results could be helpful for scientists and students interested in this research issue.