NHS Birmingham East and North,Waterlinks House, Aston, Birmingham, UK.
J Public Health (Oxf). 2011 Mar;33(1):117-22. doi: 10.1093/pubmed/fdq044. Epub 2010 Jun 9.
The healthcare costs of an aging population have major consequences for healthcare organizations and have major implication for strategic planning of services. An impending freeze in budgets in the UK makes these consequences especially significant.
We present a methodology of estimating the future healthcare costs to an organization due to an aging population that takes account of the excess costs in the years before death and the effect of morbidity compression or expansion. The performance of three different models is evaluated.
The three models all give markedly different estimated costs. Models failing to take into account both the cost burden towards the end of life and compression or expansion of morbidity can vastly under- or overestimate the most accurate estimates of healthcare expenditure due to an aging population with annual increases in costs varying from 0.48 to 1.12%.
The importance of being able to accurately predict demand and costs of health care within the NHS cannot be underestimated. Making over simplistic assumptions and not using well-established principles in these models leads to greatly different outcomes that have the potential to have massive organizational consequences in terms of short-to-medium term strategic planning.
人口老龄化对医疗保健组织的医疗成本产生重大影响，并对服务的战略规划产生重大影响。英国即将冻结预算，这使得这些后果尤为显著。
我们提出了一种估算由于人口老龄化而导致组织未来医疗成本的方法，该方法考虑了死亡前几年的超额成本以及发病率压缩或扩张的影响。评估了三种不同模型的性能。
这三种模型的估计成本差异显著。未能同时考虑生命末期的成本负担以及发病率的压缩或扩张的模型，可能会大大低估或高估由于人口老龄化导致的医疗支出的最准确估计，每年成本增加幅度从 0.48%到 1.12%不等。
能够在国民保健制度内准确预测医疗保健需求和成本的重要性怎么强调都不为过。在这些模型中过于简单地假设和不使用既定原则会导致结果大相径庭，从而有可能对短期至中期战略规划产生重大组织后果。
