Estimating and predicting the distribution of the number of visits to the medical doctor
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Philipps-Universität Marburg
Abstract
In many countries the demand for health care services is of increasing
importance. Especially in the industrialized world with a changing demographic
structure social insurances and politics face real challenges.
Reliable predictors of those demand functions will therefore become
invaluable tools. This article proposes a prediction method for the distribution
of the number of visits to the medical doctor for a determined
population, given a sample that is not necessarily taken from that population.
It uses the estimated conditional sample distribution, and it
can be applied for forecast scenarios. The methods are illustrated along
data from Sidney. The introduced methodology can be applied as well
to any other prediction problem of discrete distributions in real, future
or any fictitious population. It is therefore also an excellent tool for
future predictions, scenarios and policy evaluation.
Keywords
health economics, predicting health care demand, visits to the doctor, model selection