Évolution des profils d'état de santé et utilisation des services sociosanitaires chez les personnes âgées

Abstract This thesis aims to study the relationship between the typically heterogeneous needs of community-living elderly and their consequent utilization of health and social services. Inspired by the concept of frailty, the approach consisted in modeling the heterogeneity – by latent class analysis (LCA) – to group individuals into homogenous categories of health status, each representing a constellation of health problems. Applied to the data collected for the demonstration project of the system of integrated services for frail elderly (SIPA), LCA revealed four health state profiles that distinguish the physical and cognitive dimensions of health and capture severity along the disability dimension (Article 1). Transition analyses over 1 year and 22 months showed differentiated and gender-specific patterns of transition probabilities, confirming the sensitivity of the profiles to change in health status. The profiles are stable over time and robust to mortality and lost to follow-up attrition. Relationships between the profiles, sociodemographic characteristics and distal outcomes, such as mortality and institutionalization, confirm the classification’s validity.   These profiles were then used in two-part econometric models to study access and costs of several measures of publicly funded services (Article 2). Our results show the profiles are able to identify distinct configurations of service utilization and costs in substantially meaningful subgroups of the frail elderly population. What is important here is that the health state profiles are sensitive to differences, and changes, in available patterns of care in a specific milieu. These differences reveal choices of target groups by local authorities in delivering institutional and community-based services.   Finally, a fine analysis of these differences was performed for the costly period preceding death to establish whether the high end-of-life costs affect all elderly homogenously irrespective of the severity of their health state (Article 3). A comparative analysis revealed that survivors’ and decedents’ costs of care trends according to health status go in opposite directions. Severely disabled survivors cost significantly more compared to their relatively healthy counterparts. In contrast, the highest end-of-life costs – driven by acute hospitalizations – belong to the relatively healthy, independent of age. Among survivors and among decedents, the oldest old (85+) cost significantly less compared to younger age groups. Combined, these results support the notion of a compression of costs due to morbidity in the oldest old decedents.   The originality of this thesis rests on the fact that few very few studies attempted to model heterogeneity in health status with the goal of estimating its effect on patterns of service utilization. Moreover, in light of the shift towards community-based care as a response to economic pressures and population aging, our work is the first to describe the relationship between health status and end-of-life care in frail community-living elderly.

Keyphrases: Aging, frailty, health service utilization, latent class, costs, end-of-life