Generic software to quantify the health impact of policies
Dynamo-HIA is a simulation-based tool that allows researchers or policymakers to quantify the impact of policies related to various risk factors. It helps answer questions such as: if a government increases taxes on cigarettes, resulting in fewer people smoking, what would happen to the prevalence of lung cancer, the average life-expectancy and associated health-care costs?
Dynamo-HIA finds its roots in an EU-funded project from 2010. This project, coordinated by Erasmus Medical Centre brought together various participating institutes, including RIVM who did most of the software development. Dynamo-HIA has been used for health impact assessment in many countries.
Although Dynamo-HIA was built by a team of both researchers and software developers, it was made in a time when open science, FAIR4RS and community building did not play a major role. Therefore, there is urgent need to improve the software sustainability and quality. This was the scope of the current project, funded by RIVM.
As a result of this project the code is available on GitHub, and an R package was developed to make the model more accessible to users.
