Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

A System Dynamics Model For Simulating Ambulatory Health Care Demands, Rafael Diaz, Joshua G. Behr, Mandar Tulpule

VMASC Publications

Introduction: This article demonstrates the utility of the system dynamics approach to model and simulate US demand for ambulatory health care service both for the general population and for specific cohort subpopulations over the 5-year period, from 2003 to 2008. A system dynamics approach that is shown to meaningfully project demand for services has implications for health resource planning and for generating knowledge that is critical to assessing interventions.

Methods: The study uses a cohort-component method in combination with structural modeling to simulate ambulatory health care utilization. Data are drawn from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey and the National …

Formal And Informal Care: An Empirical Bayesian Analysis Using The Two-Part Model, Juan Du

Economics Faculty Publications

Informal care provided to the elderly by their children is proposed as a less expensive alternative to institutional long-term care. This paper explores how the elderly's consumption of medical care changes in response to changes in the informal care they receive from their children. Many earlier studies have ignored both the endogeneity of informal care and the complicated nature of health care utilization data. This paper develops a two-part model with informal care treated as an endogenous regressor and imposes exclusion restrictions on the selection process. The model is fitted using the Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, in …