On the Dynamics of Treatment in Health-Care Systems

A new approach to the modeling of the evolution in time of disease treatment is presented. The resulting model is that of a white stochastic incidence sequence generating a prevalence sequence as the output of a linear, stochastically time-varying system. The average time behavior of the episode is identified through the prevalence autocorrelation function; the latter is measured from data generated by the Quebec health-care system. The distribution of the episode duration is obtained and used to derive other statistical quantities.