Title: Analysis of expenditure on pharmaceuticals in the Spanish public health system

Authors: Jose Parreno Fernandez, Patricia Ordonez de Pablos, Raul Pino Diez

Addresses: Departamento de Administracion de Empresas y Contabilidad, Universidad de Oviedo, EPSI Gijon, Campus de Viesques. Edificio Energia, 33.204 Gijon – Asturias, Spain. ' Facultad de Ciencias Economicas, Departamento de Administracion de Empresas y Contabilidad, Universidad de Oviedo, Avd del Cristo, s/n. 33.071 Oviedo, Asturias, Spain. ' Departamento de Administracion de Empresas y Contabilidad, Universidad de Oviedo, EPSI Gijon, Campus de Viesques. Edificio Energia, 33.204 Gijon – Asturias, Spain

Abstract: In Spain, the social security (i.e., the public health system) budget relays on the local administrations of every region. From this budget, a very important amount of money goes to finance, totally or partially and medicines for people. If the administrations do not take this issue seriously, the expenses can be overwhelming. In this paper, a Spanish region called Asturias is analysed in terms of the number of medicines prescribed and charged to the social security system. In particular, two time series are analysed and forecasted: total number of prescriptions to active people and to pensioners. Two well-known methods are used to obtain forecasts: Box–Jenkins (BJ) ARIMA models and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs).

Keywords: forecasting; healthcare; pharmaceuticals; Spain; public health; social security expenditure; medical prescriptions; artificial neural networks; ANNs; ARIMA models.

DOI: 10.1504/WREMSD.2008.016209

World Review of Entrepreneurship, Management and Sustainable Development, 2008 Vol.4 No.1, pp.74 - 84

Published online: 09 Dec 2007 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article