European Commission - Public Health: Dynamo-Hia

Policy relevance

Considerable health gain can be obtained by taking health into account in policy decisions outside the health care sector. The EU has identified health impact assessment as a tool to achieve this. Health impact assessment needs reliable methods to predict health consequences of changes in exposure to determinants of health.

DYNAMO-HIA aims to contribute to informed policy making, both on the EU-level and the national level, by providing an instrument that enables health experts to predict the magnitude of health consequences that result from changing health determinants, using generally available data.

Conceptual approach

DYNAMO-HIA is based on Markov modelling and used partial micro-simulation to calculate disease and mortality from simulated risk factor histories. The user has to specify risk factor histories for both a "business as usual" or reference scenario, and for the situation after implementing the policy.

The program then calculates the amount of diseases and mortality from the different risk factor histories.

Data required by DYNAMO-HIA are those that are usually available for most countries, that is data on the population level.

DYNAMO-HIA is implemented in the form of a user-friendly software tool that does not require programming skills of the user.

Availability

The software developed in DYNAMO-HIA can be downloaded from this website, including instructions for its use. In this software also the datasets on risk factors and diseases compiled during the project are included. In the future the data used for example applications in this project will also be available from this website.