Reports on Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine Findings from University of Tokyo Provide New Insights (Predicting demand for long-term care using Japanese healthcare insurance claims data): Health and Medicine – Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine

2022 NOV 14 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Hospital & Nursing Home Daily -- A new study on environmental health and preventive medicine is now available. According to news reporting out of the University of Tokyo by NewsRx editors, research stated, “Driven by the rapid aging of the population, Japan introduced public long-term care insurance to reinforce healthcare services for the elderly in 2000.”

The news correspondents obtained a quote from the research from University of Tokyo: “Precisely predicting future demand for long-term care services helps authorities to plan and manage their healthcare resources and citizens to prevent their health status deterioration. This paper presents our novel study for developing an effective model to predict individual-level future long-term care demand using previous healthcare insurance claims data. We designed two discriminative models and subsequently trained and validated the models using three learning algorithms with medical and long-term care insurance claims and enrollment records, which were provided by 170 regional public insurers in Gifu, Japan. The prediction model based on multiclass classification and gradient-boosting decision tree achieved practically high accuracy (weighted average of Precision, 0.872; Recall, 0.878; and F-measure, 0.873) for up to 12 months after the previous claims. The top important feature variables were indicators of current health status (e.g., current eligibility levels and age), risk factors to worsen future healthcare status (e.g., dementia), and preventive care services for improving future healthcare status (e.g., training and rehabilitation).”

According to the news reporters, the research concluded: “The intensive validation tests have indicated that the developed prediction method holds high robustness, even though it yields relatively lower accuracy for specific patient groups with health conditions that are hard to distinguish.”

For more information on this research see: Predicting demand for long-term care using Japanese healthcare insurance claims data. Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine, 2022,27():42-42. (Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine - https://environhealthprevmed.biomedcentral.com/). The publisher for Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine is Komiyama Printing Co. Ltd.

A free version of this journal article is available at https://doi.org/10.1265/ehpm.22-00084.

Our news editors report that more information may be obtained by contacting Jumpei Sato, Institute of Industrial Science, University of Tokyo. Additional authors for this research include Naohiro Mitsutake, Masaru Kitsuregawa, Tomoki Ishikawa, Kazuo Goda.

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