#ISSS2017 Vienna

Dexhelpp –Decision Support for Health Policy: Methods, Models and Technologies based on Existing Health Care Data to Support the Analysis, Planning and Controlling of the Health Care System

Niki Popper & Dexhelpp Team Members

National health systems invest annually more billions of Euros (or Dollars). While the demand for health services increases (as a result of demographic change), the resources are limited. This creates a need for the development of new methods, models and technologies in order to support the analysing, planning and controlling of health care systems. Up to now decision support in health care systems is mainly based on the evidence of studies, that have a smaller range and not on the analysis of big data sets. But quantity and quality of available data strongly increases and therefore facilitates the description and analysis of all areas in health care systems.

To provide state of the art Health Technology Assessment (HTA), Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) and Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) we will need to combine health system domain knowledge, knowledge of professional data processes and – last but not least – mathematical modelling & simulation skills. The areas of data security & data management, big data analysis, machine and deep learning, statistical methods, mathematical modelling & simulation and visualisation as well as public health & decision analytics modelling should help us to transform Big Data into Deep Data: evidence based, reproducible knowledge.

To bring together all technologies still is a huge challenge. Data Based Demographic models have to be combined with analysis and models for the spreading of diseases. Time dependent treatment paths have to be parametrized with data sets from clinical routine joined with large scale health system data. From the system simulation point of view an important aspect is the possibility to implement changes inside the system, like interventions inside the computer model, and to analyse their effects. N. Popper tries to point out how big interdisciplinary teams will handle the complex processes in the future and which methods are and aren’t promising.

Nikolas Popper (Director DEXHELPP – Decision Support for Health Policy and Planning, Vienna; Coordinator Centre for Computational Complex Systems, TU Wien; CSO dwh GmbH – Simulation Services and Technical Solutions, Vienna)