A Segment of Healthy and Unhealthy Lifestyle Consumers Affects Healthcare Expenditures: An Application of Data Mining in Healthcare

Data mining is a useful tool to analyze healthcare information and identify personal behavior patterns for policy decision-making., The purpose of this study is to identify healthy and unhealthy families using the household income and expenditure database and to analyze the difference of household healthcare expenditures among the healthy and unhealthy lifestyle groups. The database was composed of the data of the DGBAS surveys over 40 years. The methods in this study were descriptive analyses, ANOVA, cluster analysis, and the Chi-square test. The descriptive results showed there were four types of groups, including Smoker, Alcoholic, Unhealthy diet, and Healthy lifestyle. The healthcare expenditure of the Healthy lifestyle group was significantly lower than that of the other three unhealthy lifestyle groups. Keeping a healthy lifestyle is important for a family since it may decrease healthcare expenditure. The government has to be aware and reduce the cause of high healthcare expenditure by policy-making, to promote well-being, and create a better society.