Economic Simulation Platform
A microsimulation, policy evaluation tool to estimate health and economic burden reductions. By matching cohort and general population surveys data, this tool can be used to analyse how policy making and/or personal investment into a healthy lifestyle will influence the relevant health trajectories and the associated economic burden.
This platform focuses on assessing and projecting the economic burden related to non-communicable diseases, associated with different kinds of external exposures (environmental, social, and behavioural), using a dynamic microsimulation model.
The model consists of:
- A tool that uses the observed effects from a clinical study, for example the association between humidity and child blood pressure trajectories or from other external sources, and simulates these effects in matched data*. The simulation tool uses different plausible scenarios to show how the observed effect may change.
- A set of transition parameters, for example changes in blood pressure between 1 and 4 years old, 4 and 10 years old and so on or the impact of a fiscal reform on disposable income, estimated on the matched data*.
- A module to assess the impact of alternative policies on health outcomes, for example how household disposable income affects Body Mass Index (BMI).
The validated dynamic microsimulation model can be used to evaluate ‘what if’ scenarios, building on the causal relationships identified and subsequently feeding into the development of policy.
*A matched sample between a general population survey and the population of the clinical study can be constructed via nearest-neighbour matching (NNM) using a vector of common variables shared across the two samples.
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