Living Longer
to Living Healthier.
A policy-oriented view of how health systems can move beyond extending life toward protecting healthy years through prevention, immunization, early detection, proactive delivery and stronger systems.
Are countries converting longer lives into more years lived in full health—and where can upstream action close the gap?
From reactive care to preemptive, proactive health.GC21CH frames healthy longevity as a system outcome shaped by prevention, access, early action, social conditions and health-system capability.
The outcome is not only how long people live, but how well they live.
This dashboard combines country-level health indicators with immunization profiles, healthy-longevity measures and a separate global disease-burden benchmark. Reference years and data scope are retained so comparisons are interpreted responsibly.
Are healthy years keeping pace with longer lives?
Longevity at age 60 describes expected remaining life. HALE at age 60 describes expected remaining years in full health. Their difference is the healthy-life gap—a mathematical indicator of years not expected to be lived in full health.
Global unweighted trajectory
Healthy-life gap by country
Immunization is an upstream protection layer.
Select a country to examine the mean of all available reported vaccine indicators, the separate core index, every reported vaccine value and the three lowest reported coverages.
Reported vaccine coverage profile
Three lowest reported vaccine coverages
Where is reported coverage strongest—and where are the gaps?
Rankings use the mean of all available vaccine indicators for each country, or a selected vaccine when the vaccine selector is used. Countries with missing values for a selected indicator are excluded from that ranking.
Core immunization coverage map
How does healthy longevity vary across immunization coverage levels?
These line charts group countries into core immunization coverage bands and show the average HALE within each band. This makes the overall pattern easier to interpret than a country-level scatter plot while preserving the distinction between association and causation.
Average HALE at birth by immunization coverage band
Average HALE at age 60 by immunization coverage band
Correlation summary
Preemptive care is the operating principle for healthy longevity.
Healthy longevity requires health systems to identify risks earlier, intervene before avoidable deterioration and help people preserve functional ability across the life course.
This strategic framework complements the dashboard’s quantitative evidence. It is not presented as an additional country-level dataset indicator.
Move from treating illness after it appears to protecting health before decline becomes harder to reverse.
Preemptive Care establishes the principle: anticipate risk, act early and preserve healthy years. Proactive Delivery is the mechanism through which health systems turn that principle into timely, coordinated action.
Healthy Longevity
More years lived in good health, with functional ability, independence and well-being.
Preemptive Care
Identify risks and early decline, then prevent, detect or manage problems before they become avoidable harm.
Proactive Delivery
Reach people with screening, follow-up, monitoring, referrals and support before crisis care is required.
Enabling capabilities
Genomic and Risk-Informed Prevention
Use clinically appropriate genetic, genomic and risk information to support earlier surveillance and more targeted prevention, with consent, counselling, privacy and equity safeguards.
AI-Enabled Health Intelligence
Use AI for early risk identification, clinical decision support, population-health surveillance and care prioritisation, supported by human oversight, transparency and bias monitoring.
Integrated Data, Diagnostics and Digital Infrastructure
Connect timely diagnostics, interoperable records, remote monitoring and coordinated pathways so that early insight can lead to effective action.
What this means for policymakers
Build prevention-oriented financing, strengthen primary and community care, establish risk-based outreach, invest in diagnostics and data infrastructure, and create governance frameworks for genomics and AI.
Interpretation guardrail
The dashboard’s quantitative sections report observed or derived data. The preemptive-care framework translates those findings into strategic questions and possible system responses; it does not prove that any single intervention causes a particular HALE outcome.
What does the global burden of disease look like across time, age and cause?
The incorporated GBD file is global-level data only. It is used here as contextual benchmarking and must not be interpreted as country-level disease burden or used for country rankings.
Global disease burden over time
Global disease burden by age group
Global NCD burden by age and health outcome
Global burden by cause
Transparent by design.
The dashboard distinguishes reported values from derived measures, preserves missingness, and displays the relevant reference year and scope wherever possible.
Immunization
Source layer: WHO/UNICEF WUENIC 2025 revision as supplied. Overall coverage is the mean of all available vaccine percentages. Core index is the mean of BCG, DTP3 and MCV1.
Healthy longevity
HALE at birth is from the supplied WHO 2021 layer. The age-60 series uses the supplied 2016–2024 local GC21CH series and retains its source note and estimation status.
GBD
Source layer: IHME GBD 2023 export. Scope is global only, with years 2003–2023 and measures including deaths, DALYs, YLDs and YLLs.