Influencing Factors And Control Strategies Of Hepatitis A Medical Costs Based On Data Mining

With the continuous development of the socio-economic, ageing populations and theprogress of medical technology, the rapid growth of medical costs has become a seriousproblem of every government all around the world. China’s medical cost growth rate hasexceeded the level of income growth and it has a serious impact on the fairness, efficiencyand accessibility of the basic medical services. Hepatitis A is a liver infection caused bythe hepatitis A virus (HAV). Hepatitis A occurs sporadically and in epidemics worldwide.HOW to solve the issue of “being unaffordable and difficult to see a doctor” has becomethe key point and difficulty in the course of our medical care reform. Hepatitis A imposesa great negative impact on patients’ physical, mental health, and their economic life.Using the review investigation method, this research collected the medicalinformation of hepatitis A patients of seven cities’ seven hospitals in Guangdong province,the intermediate epidemic region. Then use several data mining tools to analyze the maininfluence factors of the medical costs and try to find a reasonable way to controlthe medical costs effectively.In this research, all data mining methods were achieved by SPSS Clementinesoftware. First，obtain the hepatitis A patients’ medical information of the seven hospitalsselected by the survey. After interviewing of patients and clinic experts, we get the basicdiagnostic information of115hepatitis A patients. According to the distribution, weclassified the medical costs of the hepatitis A patients into two categories, as thedependent variables. Second，we selected the important variables from the19patients’attributions by feature selection. Finally,9attributions were selected to participate in thedata mining as the independent variables.Then build up the data mining model with the dependent variables and theindependent variables by decision tree, artificial neural network and support vectormachine to ranking the influence factors according to their importance. Compare thepredicting accuracy and the ranking reasonability of the three data mining method. Theresults showed that support vector machines are the most accurate predictor followed byartificial neural networks and decision tree. According to the past literature and theevaluation by the medical experts, the importance of the factors ranked by thesupport vector machine was to be the most reasonable, descending order of the medicalcosts influence factors of hepatitis A patients were hospital degree, days of hospitalization, the payment way, the city belongs to, diagnosis comparison, sex, age，disease type andcondition of leaving hospital.Effective measures are adopted to control unreasonable increase of medical costs onthe main influence factors. China should control the medical cost from the macro andmicro perspective. Government should allocate the medical resources rationally andestablish division of labor and coordination of work in different hospital degrees.Try to reduce the imbalance in allocation of urban and rural health resource and regionaldifferences in medical and health institutions. Introduce the for-profit hospitals toparticipate in the competition of health care market. Strengthen the prevention ofinfectious diseases. Under the economic burden, make more infectious diseases to beincluded in national immunization programmes to provide protection against virus. Socialhealth insurance institutions should extend the coverage and the payment amount andrational medical insurance scheme must be established. From the micro perspective,charges for medicine are the highest proportion of medical cost. Hospitalshould standardize the process of medicine using, reasonable checks; reduce the days ofhospitalization to guide the reasonable medical consumption. Try to establish prospectivepayment system in China and set the maximum medical cost for each disease. Peopleshould respond to health education and health promotion actively, choose a healthylifestyle and leave away from the damage of the disease. These strategies for the medicalcosts would give references for controlling the excessive growth of medical costs.