Increasing emphasis on disease prevention and health promotion attests to growing recognition of the importance of quality of life as a standard for measuring the performance of the nation's health care system and its supporting research enterprise. This standard should be applied more broadly and operationalized in ways that go beyond monitoring the incidence and prevalence of disease, measures that reflect only the effectiveness of primary prevention and acute care. Quality of life can also be gauged in ways that measure how effective secondary and tertiary prevention measures are, for example, in promoting independence among people with disabling conditions or in reducing work absences among the population with disabling conditions.

Fully embracing quality of life as a national health standard can bridge artificial boundaries between disciplines and between social and medical services. If averting disease and maintaining functional capacity among people with disabling conditions are shared goals, then once-isolated efforts addressing medical, housing, educational, transportation, and other relevant issues are more easily integrated, increasing prospects for achieving the coordination and synergy now lacking in disability-related programs.