At present, chronic pathologies have become a challenge for health systems in developed countries. The majority of sick people that use health services have multiple morbidity and this increases with age. The presence of multiple morbidity is associated with a greater use of resources for care (both health and social) and a lower quality of life.
In this context, it is necessary to measure multiple morbidity to be able to determine its impact. There are two large sets of measurements of multiple morbidity: on the one hand, a simple count of the diseases (usually chronic) of each person and, on the other, indexes which indicate the burden of an individual’s diseases based on the ranking of pathologies giving each one a differential weighting drawn from clinical criteria provided by groups of experts and/or statistical analysis based on mortality or the utilisation of health services.
The Adjusted Morbidity Groups (AMG) are encompassed in this last group, the only one of these tools developed in Europe on the basis of a public health system, universal in nature and eminently free.
The characteristics and functioning of the AMG can be found in this article. In a nutshell, we can say that the AMG have been validated statistically, by analysing their explanatory and predictive capacity. In this validation, the AMG have shown better results than other tools in the majority of indicators studied, including those relative to social and health care.
They have also been validated clinically by primary care doctors, both in Catalonia and in the Community of Madrid. The main results of these validations are that the AMG show a good classification of the patient in terms of risk, that this good classification increases with the complexity of the patient, the preference of clinicians for this tool with respect to other tools to classify morbidity and finally, that it is a useful tool for assigning a level of intervention in accordance with the needs of patients.
From 2012, the AMG were developed in the framework of an agreement of collaboration between CatSalut and Catalan Health Institute. Subsequently, they have been implemented at a national level in 13 autonomous communities thanks to an agreement reached between CatSalut and the Ministry of Health, Social and Equality Services. As a result of the implementations done during 2015, 38 million people of the Spanish population have been classified. The final goal of this agreement is to jointly develop a tool to stratify the population and which could be applicable to the entire National Health System by means of adapting the AMG.
Similarly, the AMG are being used in several European projects concerning the stratification and integration of health and social care.
In summary, we can assert that the AMG are a new classifier of morbidity which shows comparable results -at the very least- to those provided by other classifiers on the market. On the other hand, having been developed using the information from our health system (universal and eminently free), it can not only be adapted to new requirements or strategies of our organisations, but also to other health systems as well as to specific areas or populations. Evidence of this last point is that at the moment, together with the Master Plan of Mental Health and Addictions of the Health Department, a specific classifier is being developed for patients with mental health and addiction problems.
Post written by David Monterde (Oficina d’Estadística. Sistemes d’Informació. Institut Català de la Salut), Emili Vela (Àrea d’Atenció Sanitària. Servei Català de la Salut) and Montse Clèries (Àrea d’Atenció Sanitària. Servei Català de la Salut).