Modeling Healthy Life Expectancy and Health Policy Analysis

Abstract

As the rapid aging society, efforts are being made to ‘extend healthy life and improve health equity’. However, the gap between life expectancy and healthy life spans about 10% of their lives. Therefore, in this study, a model for calculating the healthy life expectancy in Korea was presented. In addition, this study were analyzed the causes of the gap between life expectancy and healthy life spans, and was analyzed the effect of reducing the gap in healthy life expectancy through health policy. Healthy life expectancy adjusted for health-related quality of life was 75.3 years old in 2018, and the difference between life expectancy and healthy life expectancy was about 7.3 years. Compared to 72.6 years of age, Healthy life expectancy adjusted for health-related quality of life in 2009, health life expectancy increased by about 2.7 years over 10 years. The region with the highest Healthy life expectancy was 78.8 years and the region with the lowest was 72.1 years, and the difference between regions was 6.7 years. As a result of analyzing the determinants of life expectancy and healthy life expectancy by region using spatial analysis, it was found that smoking, diabetes, and unmet medical care were the factors that influence the healthy life expectancy. In particular, it was found that the unmet medical care strongly influenced the healthy life expectancy of women in the community. It was analyzed that one of the main factors determining healthy life expectancy is the smoking rate, and in this study, the change of healthy life expectancy through smoking cessation policy were analyzed. The Markov cohort simulation method was applied, and the cohort model was constructed to compare the life expectancy and healthy life expectancy of the cohorts of smokers, former smokers, and non-smokers. As a result of the analysis, the life expectancy of the current smoker, a 40-year-old male, was 37.67 years old, the former smokers were 38.94 years old, and the non-smokers 43.86 years old. Therefore, the difference in life expectancy between current smokers and non-smokers was 6.19 years, in which current smokers had a shorter life expectancy of 6.19 years than non-smokers. In order to analyze the impact of health promotion programs, it is necessary to calculate the healthy life expectancy, prepare scenarios for each policy plan for the determinants that affect health level, and forecast the results. And based on this, it can be used to evaluate how individual health promotion projects contribute to extending health life, which is the overall goal of the future health promotion plan.