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Pardee Logo International Futures at the Pardee Center

International Futures Help System

Health

Overview

The IFs health model allows users to forecast age, sex, and country specific health outcomes related to 15 cause categories (see table) out to the year 2100.  Based on previous work done by the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Global Burden of Disease (GBD) project [1] , formulations based on three distal drivers – income, education, and technology – comprise the core of the IFs health model.  However, the IFs model goes beyond the distal drivers, including both richer structural formulations and proximate health drivers (e.g. nutrition and environmental variables).  Integration into the IFs system also allows us to incorporate forward linkages from health to other systems, such as the economic and population modules.  Importantly, IFs provides the user the ability to vary model assumptions and create customized scenarios; as such, IFs is a tool exploring how policy choices might result in alternative health futures.

This documentation supplements the third volume of the PPHP series, “Improving Global Health,” (Hughes et al, 2011) by providing technical details of health model integration into the IFs system.  It includes the specific equations used to forecast outcomes and drivers, relative risk values for proximate drivers, and data manipulations related to model initialization and projection.  We intend the IFs model to be fully transparent to all users, and invite comments and questions at http://www.ifs.du.edu/contact/index.aspx.

Cause groups in IFs

 Group I – Communicable, Maternal, Perinatal, and Nutritional Conditions

  • Diarrheal diseases
  • Malaria
  • Respiratory infections
  • HIV/AIDS
  • Other Group I causes

 Group II – Noncommunicable Diseases

  • Malignant neoplasms
  • Cardiovascular diseases
  • Digestive diseases
  • Chronic respiratory diseases
  • Diabetes
  • Mental health
  • Other Group II causes

 Group III – Injuries

  • Road traffic accidents
  • Other unintentional injuries
  • Intentional injuries
 

[1] See Mathers and Loncar (2006) for details on GBD projections of cause-specific mortality out to 2030.