Exploring the impact of management of chronic illnesses through
prevention on the U.S. healthcare delivery system – A closed loop system's
modeling study
Affiliations: Opus College of Business, University of St. Thomas,
Mail # TMH 343, 1000 LaSalle Avenue, Minneapolis, MN, USA. Tel.: +1 651 962
4350; E-mail: skumar@stthomas.edu
Abstract: Treatment of chronic diseases presents a major cost burden to U.S.
National Healthcare delivery system. Chronic conditions such as cardiovascular
diseases, cancer, diabetes, arthritis, and respiratory diseases are major
causes of death in the U.S. and main source of illnesses, hospitalization,
healthcare costs and long term disability and productivity loss. Without
aggressive intervention into underlying causes of these chronic diseases and
their costs, these trends are expected to continue to worsen. The purpose of
this study is to explore how the dynamical growth of chronic diseases
contributes to increasing chronic treatment costs, negatively affecting
available funds for preventive measures and subsequently affecting growth of
health risk factors. These factors, in turn, contribute to increases in chronic
illnesses. A detailed closed loop business framework for system modeling on
chronic disease prevention was developed to study the interactions among two
chronic diseases (diabetes and lung cancer), related health risk factors, using
regression analysis, preventive programs and associated costs. Causal behavior
of chronic diseases in relation to preventive measures was dynamically analyzed
to determine the financial implications on health care costs. This model used
optimization to provide minimum threshold values of prevention program costs
and reduction effect on health risk factors within respective ranges to achieve
breakeven values for costs of preventive measures equal to savings from reduced
direct treatment costs over time period. The proposed closed loop system's
modeling framework can be used by researchers and decision makers for studying
the two chronic disease behavior and can also be expanded to include other
chronic and acute conditions, as well as, interactions between chronic diseases
and other health risk factors.
