Long Term Effectiveness of Elderly Health Care Voucher Scheme Strategies: A System Dynamics Simulation Analysis
Abstract Background: The elderly healthcare voucher (EHCV) scheme is expected to increase the number of elders choosing private primary healthcare services and, on the other hand, to reduce reliance on the public sector in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, the scheme was not satisfactorily as reported in the literature to date. In this study, we examined the changes in the ratio of visits between public and private doctors in primary care (as a metric of reliance on the public sector) for different strategic scenarios in the scheme.Methods: Based on the comments from the expertise discussion, a system dynamics model was formulated to simulate the impact of different enhanced strategy in the scheme: Increasing voucher amounts, lowering the age eligibility, and designating vouchers for chronic conditions follow-up. Data and statistics for model calibration were collected from different sources.Results: The simulation results showed that the current EHCV scheme was unable to reduce the utilization of public healthcare services as well as the ratio of visits between public and private when the local population aging was taken into account. When comparing the 3 different tested scenarios, even if the increase of annual voucher amount could be kept with a current pace or the age eligibility could be lowered to 60 years old, the impacts on the shifts from public to private utilization were not apparent in which the public-to-private ratio could only drop slightly from 0.74 to 0.64 in the first several years. Nevertheless, introducing a chronic disease-oriented voucher could result in an apparent drop of public-to-private ratio to 0.50 in the early implementation phase but the effect could not be maintained for a period of time. Conclusions: Our findings assist officials to further improve the design of EHCV scheme, within the bigger context of promoting primary care among the elderly. We suggested an additional chronic disease-oriented voucher could be an alternative strategy but the enhancement on the voucher amount should be considered if a long term planning was required. For not substantially rising the government expenditure for refining the scheme, health promotion works for encouraging co-payment from elderly for is recommended.