The demand to initiate medical care: A morbidity specific analysis

The dependence of the one year probability of utilizing preventive services and the one year probability of utilizing visits for acute micro-organism disease in the Kaiser-Oregon Prepaid Medical Care System on ten (10) explanatory factors has been investigated using a multiple logistic function analysis.Our results demonstrate the importance of disaggregating the population and the type of medical care when investigating the determinants of utilizing service. This is especially important for understanding the underlying structure of medical care utilization decisions.The study also illustrates a potentially fruitful application of the multivariate logistic analysis to the fields of health care planning and policy analysis. The use of specific types of medical care in the short-term is probabilistic and depends on many factors. For most groups, the multivariate logistic approach produces an analysis reasonably consistent with the actual data.Further research is needed to test the predictive ability of these types of utilization models and to investigate the determinants of other morbidity specific types of medical care utilization. The problem will then be to develop a model of the quantity of alternative types of services utilized-conditioned on the number of persons initiating service for alternative health reasons.