Healthcare Utilisation and Cost Projections using a Future Adult Model by Ethnic Groups

Enhancing the use of existing separate population datasets via data linkage will greatly facilitate insight into trends in the disease and healthcare patterns of the population, as a first step to improved projections of national healthcare utilisation, costs, and influences on their trajectories. This study aims to leverage on existing data from the Singapore Population Health Studies (SPHS) cohorts under NUS, healthcare utilisation and cost data from MOH TRUST, and mortality and common diseases data (cancer, stroke, AMI and chronic kidney disease) from the National Registry of Disease Office (NRDO) to project future healthcare costs by developing the micro-simulation Future Elderly Model (FEM) for Singapore. The breadth of variables examined in the discrete cohort datasets, when linked with the accuracy of healthcare utilisation and costs from the MOH administrative datasets, will allow for a more comprehensive examination of disease patterns and their associations, risk factors, and service utilisation outcomes. This will increase the robustness of the FEM and allow for more accurate projection estimates of future healthcare costs, in turn facilitating health policy decisions for the country.