Modeling (Multi-)Morbidity and (Poly-)Pharmacy in Outpatient Treatment with Gamma Distributions

Reinhard Schuster, Thomas Ostermann, Timo Emcke

2019

Abstract

Polypharmacy is often direcly causes by age and gender dependent multimorbidity. Todays treatment concepts, the individual decisions taken by physicians and the administration have to adress the complex needs of multimorbid patients. For modeling those phenomena on a collective level of an entire federal state a sufficiently large data repository is essential. The administrative bodies of the statutory health insurance in Germany have the data necessary and built up an extensive skill-set and inexpensive free-software tool-set for those evaluations. This study analyses the complete patient data of all outpatient treatments and drug prescriptions in Schleswig-Holstein (Northern German federal state) in the first quarter of 2017. Well adopted probability distributions for the frequency of diseases and drug groups decreasingly ordered within the classification system for all patients and age/gender partitions are estimated. Subsequently the levels of multimorbidity and polypharmacy (level of ICD-10/ATC-codes per quarter) are analysed in the same way. As a main result gamma distributions provide a well-adjusted model class for ICD and ATC code frequencies in the present very large routine dataset. The goodness-of-fit (full range of magnitudes of measurements) is much better than using mean values and variances.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Schuster R., Ostermann T. and Emcke T. (2019). Modeling (Multi-)Morbidity and (Poly-)Pharmacy in Outpatient Treatment with Gamma Distributions. In Proceedings of the 12th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2019) - Volume 5: HEALTHINF; ISBN 978-989-758-353-7, SciTePress, pages 353-358. DOI: 10.5220/0007396503530358

in Bibtex Style

@conference{healthinf19,
author={Reinhard Schuster and Thomas Ostermann and Timo Emcke},
title={Modeling (Multi-)Morbidity and (Poly-)Pharmacy in Outpatient Treatment with Gamma Distributions},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 12th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2019) - Volume 5: HEALTHINF},
year={2019},
pages={353-358},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0007396503530358},
isbn={978-989-758-353-7},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 12th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2019) - Volume 5: HEALTHINF
TI - Modeling (Multi-)Morbidity and (Poly-)Pharmacy in Outpatient Treatment with Gamma Distributions
SN - 978-989-758-353-7
AU - Schuster R.
AU - Ostermann T.
AU - Emcke T.
PY - 2019
SP - 353
EP - 358
DO - 10.5220/0007396503530358
PB - SciTePress