Predictability of drug expenditures: An application using morbidity data

Manuel García-Goñi () and Pere Ibern

Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Abstract: The growth of pharmaceutical expenditure and its prediction is a major concern for policy makers and health care managers. This paper explores different predictive models to estimate future drug expenses, using demographic and morbidity individual information from an integrated healthcare delivery organization in Catalonia for years 2002 and 2003. The morbidity information consists of codified health encounters grouped through the Clinical Risk Groups (CRGs). We estimate pharmaceutical costs using several model specifications, and CRGs as risk adjusters, providing an alternative way of obtaining high predictive power comparable to other estimations of drug expenditures in the literature. These results have clear implications for the use of risk adjustment and CRGs in setting the premiums for pharmaceutical benefits.

Keywords: Drug expenditure; risk-adjustment; morbidity; clinical risk groups (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://econ-papers.upf.edu/papers/977.pdf Whole Paper (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:upf:upfgen:977

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).