Business Dynamics
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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.