A decision support system for the budgeting of the Belgian health care system

The Belgian Ministry for Social Affairs asked the departments of Applied Economics and Operational Research of the Université Libre de Bruxelles to develop methodological tools aimed at helping to understand health care budget consumption. The paper will describe the proposed methodology while focusing on the construction of ‘health care channels’ through causality analysis and on the multicriteria assignment of the insured to them. The Minister decided to prolong that research by putting the accent on the development of a decision support system implementing the worked out methodology. This system is meant for the I.N.A.M.I.-R.I.Z.I.V.'s (National Institute of Insurance against Disease and Handicap) actuaries to provide them with new analysis elements. Along with various packages, these elements are being encompassed in a decision support system the characteristics of which are presented in the last section of the paper.