Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften

Abstract:
The Austrian Federal Ministry of Health aims to improve the health of all people living in Austria and to decrease social inequalities in health and other areas. This leads to careful planning and distribution of the available health care resources to meet the targets of the government. Health related data mainly exists at federal state level, which provides an interesting overview of the current health situation, but for regional planning authorities, this data is often insufficient as they can hide pockets of high and low health prevalence in certain municipalities. The research project SALUD (SpatiAL microsimUlation for Decision support), funded by the Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology, and the Austrian Science Fund, focuses on building a spatial microsimulation model for Austria. This paper presents the use-case of a spatial analysis of estimated smokers for municipalities in the year 2011. This is done by combining survey and census data to model, in particular, the health issues of small areas (e.g. municipalities, districts) based on individuals or households where no data exists, so called missing data. Within this project, a first framework of simSALUD (www.simsalud.org/simsalud) is developed, which is a web-based spatial microsimulation application (designed as wizard) for health decision support, as there is currently no flexible and freely-available web mapping framework in the area of spatial microsimulation. The application is designed for experts as well as for non-experts to simulate their own data that can be visualized afterwards without any programming skills. The results will be valuable in supporting policy decision makers by indicating where spatial health inequalities exist, so that they can distribute their resources more efficiently and thus reduce health inequalities.