Besides financial support, public assistance recipients have diverse and complex health and social support needs. The segmentation approach can be used to provide tailored support interventions for a targeted group of individuals. The research group was led by Associate Professor Naoki Kondo (during the research, currently a Professor at the Graduate School of Medicine and School of Public Health, Kyoto University) and Keiko Ueno, a PhD student at the Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo (during the research, currently Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Medicine and School of Public Health, Kyoto University), employed market segmentation and a soft clustering technique to characterize different segments within the population of older public assistance recipients in Japan. They examined the similarities between the extracted segments and public assistance recipients in practice by interviewing caseworkers at welfare offices. Consequently, five distinct segments of older recipients were identified for each sex. Caseworkers perceived several segments as those in practice. Moreover, we extracted segments with characteristics that caseworkers had not previously been aware of. Accordingly, they have been developing a tailor-made health support system that presents support plans for each segment. The results of this research were published online in the International Journal for Equity in Health on August 3, 2023.
