From Health Metrics to Public Wellbeing, Prof. Yuli Amran Proposes the Maqashid Health Index
Harun Nasution Auditorium, UIN News Online – Health statistics can illustrate the condition of a society, yet they do not necessarily reveal who benefits and who remains left behind. This concern formed the core focus of Prof. Dr. Yuli Amran, M.K.M., during her professorial address titled “From Numbers to Public Good: Biostatistics and the Development of the Maqashid Health Index” during the Open Senate Session for the Professorial Inauguration at UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta in the Harun Nasution Auditorium on Wednesday (30/09/2026). On this occasion, Prof. Yuli was officially inaugurated as Full Professor of Public Health Biostatistics.
In her address, Prof. Yuli highlighted the limitations of aggregate metrics in fully representing population health. Data such as mean blood pressure, disease prevalence, mortality rates, or health service coverage are essential for reading population health conditions, yet they can conceal inter-group disparities and underlying deficiencies still experienced by portions of the population. Therefore, she argued, the application of biostatistics must be directed so that numerical metrics remain firmly connected to the overarching goals of public health.
“Numbers remain scientific tools, but the human beings represented by those numbers must remain the central focus,” she explained.
This vision was elaborated through the concept of Biostatistics for Public Benefit (Biostatistik untuk Kemaslahatan), which converges Maqashid al-Shariah, public health, and biostatistics. Maqashid al-Shariah provides direction regarding the essential dimensions of human life requiring protection, public health translates them into relevant operational domains, and biostatistics offers the methodology to measure them systematically.
“The integration of Islamic values and scientific disciplines thus takes place from the moment a problem is defined and choices are made regarding what to measure, rather than being appended after the analysis is completed,” she noted.
Building on this foundation, Prof. Yuli proposed the Maqashid Health Index (MHI), a conceptual framework for a multidimensional composite index designed to evaluate public health with an orientation toward public benefit (maslahah). The framework utilizes the five core dimensions of Maqashid al-Shariah: hifz al-din for the protection of faith and belief, hifz al-nafs for the protection of human life, hifz al-'aql for the protection of intellect and human capability, hifz al-nasl for the protection of lineage and generational sustainability, and hifz al-mal for the protection of economic resources. These five dimensions do not serve directly as indicators themselves, but rather function as directional guides to define the specific aspects of health that require protection.
The MHI concept also embeds three core principles as its defining identity: multidimensional benefit, equity in evaluating distribution, and minimum threshold protection. Consequently, health measurement does not merely inquire into the level of overall achievement, but scrutinizes who receives the benefits and whether fundamental deficiencies exist that are masked by high performance in other domains.
These principles ensure that the MHI does not reduce public health to a single aggregate figure. The assessment results are structured to be interpreted through an overall score, individual dimensional profiles, disparity metrics, and vulnerability data. In this manner, statistics do not merely indicate a population's baseline status, but actively help highlight areas that continue to demand targeted intervention.
This vision aligns seamlessly with Prof. Yuli's academic journey in public health biostatistics at UIN Jakarta, which began in 2008 before she completed her doctoral studies in 2018. Her dedication to the Faculty of Health Sciences (FIKES) has expanded beyond teaching and academic mentorship into key administrative and leadership responsibilities. In 2019, she was entrusted as Vice Dean for General Administration at FIKES UIN Jakarta for the 2019–2023 term and was reappointed for the 2023–2027 period. In her academic duties, she teaches Biostatistics and actively supervises student research in public health.
This extensive experience provides the backdrop for the framework she proposed through the MHI. Prof. Yuli is not merely offering a new health metric, but a method for interpreting numbers so they remain inextricably linked to the human lives they represent. If continuously developed and tested, the MHI is envisioned to bridge statistical precision with an orientation toward human flourishing.
“If this framework can be thoroughly developed and empirically tested, the MHI can serve as a vital step in advancing biostatistics from measuring health status to measuring human benefit,” Prof. Yuli concluded.
Ultimately, Prof. Yuli does not stop at constructing a novel health metric. Instead, she invites a shift in how biostatistics is conceptualized, bringing numerical data closer to the real human realities it seeks to comprehend.
In the end, Prof. Yuli's framework positions numbers not as an end in themselves, but as a gateway to viewing human conditions more holistically. Through the MHI, health achievements are read alongside the distribution of benefits and the protection of fundamental human needs. From this starting point, biostatistics is guided to move beyond asking how healthy a society is to confronting the broader question of the extent to which that health truly delivers meaningful public benefit.
Watch the complete proceeding of the Open Senate Session for the Professorial Inauguration on UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta's official YouTube channel: