Microsimulation of population health interventions: Comparing the effectiveness of different intervention strategies to improve population health
Professor John Lynch and colleagues have recently published on simulating the effects of conventional risk factors on relative and absolute inequalities in CHD. While this is a crude form of simulation, it is being replicated and becoming influential as a method of generating counterfactual scenarios.
Professor Lynch is currently working with colleagues using more sophisticated simulation scenarios and future research will develop methods of taking what is known about the causes of population levels and health inequities in Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) and diabetes, and attempt to model, through the use of micro-simulations, the population-level yield and health inequity reduction from various sorts of fundamental, primary, secondary and tertiary interventions.
Such simulation models are populated with knowledge synthesis
of the inter-relations between the main biological, behavioural and social
risk factors. Future research involves the formation of a pan-Canadian
collaboration of researchers interested in applying the POHEM
micro-simulation model of population health developed by Statistics Canada.
Professor Lynch plans to create a similar research platform in Australia
which will include a cost effectiveness component.