Study to Determine Demand for Health Care Services in the Catchment Area of theJoint Military Medical Command, San Antonio, Texas (Final Report July 27, 1989-July 27, 1990)

摘要

The Joint Military Medical Command - San Antonio is responsible for the deliveryof all military medical care in the San Antonio catchment area. With this task comes the responsibility to effectively and efficiently allocate resources for providing services. A planning tool has been developed, in the form of a conceptual model, to serve as a decision support mechanism. This mechanism guides resource allocations by predicting demand for health care services. The model incorporates a four-step process for determining demand. In Step 1, service utilization is determined. Step 2 involves the identification of the population who use health services and the establishment of the population mix. Age, family income, and sex, were specifically evaluated here. With utilization and population data, incidence rates are computed. Then in Step 3, using the incidence rates computed in Step 2, future demand is forecast by regressing the average yearly change in population mix and associated incidence rates into future years. The final step is to periodically determine which demographic factors can be used as predictors of health care demand.