Construction and results of a comprehensive index for gastrointestinal health monitoring in China: a nationwide study

Background The disease burden of gastrointestinal disease (GD) in China is high, with significant variation across provinces. A comprehensive agreed set of indicators could guide rational resource allocation to support better GD outcomes.Methods This study collected data from multiple sources, including national surveillance, surveys, registration sys-tems, and scientific research. Literature reviews and Delphi methods were used to obtain monitoring indicators; the analytic hierarchy process was used to determine indicator weights.Findings The China Gastrointestinal Health Index (GHI) system consisted of four dimensions and 46 indicators. The weight of the four dimensions from high to low included the prevalence of gastrointestinal non-neoplastic diseases and gastrointestinal neoplasms (GN) (0.3246), clinical treatment of GD (0.2884), prevention and control of risk factors (0.2606), and exposure to risk factors (0.1264). The highest indicator weight of GHI rank was the successful smoking cessation rate (0.1253), followed by the 5-year survival rate of GN (0.0905), and the examination rate of diagnostic oesophagogastroduodenoscopy (0.0661). The overall GHI for China in 2019 was 49.89, varying from 39.19 to 76.13 across all sub-regions. The top five sub-regions in the total GHI score were in the eastern region. Interpretation GHI is the first system designed to monitor gastrointestinal health systematically. In the future, data from sub-regions of China should be used to test and improve the GHI system for its impact.Copyright & COPY; 2023 Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).