Characterizing the Public Health and Health Care System

Understanding health care usage is critical to planning and improving our health care system. Likewise, measuring the inputs and outcome of the public health system is key to understanding how the system is functioning and where improvements are needed. Our team investigates: who are these users, presently, and based on their habits, who will the users be in the future? Our goal is to use this present-moment inquiry into health care spending to generate comprehensive expenditure categories, which will afford health care forecasting, and reveal the effects of broader determinants, like socioeconomic status (SES), in leading to high health care utilization.

Since 2014, Dr. Rosella and her team have published on the role of various factors including health behaviours demographics and SES gradients in relation to health care and public health systems. Her team is focused on honing the beacon of inquiry in this area, so that the rising cost of health care may be understood from an upstream perspective.

To learn more about our work in this area, please see the following resources: