MODELING MULTIDIMENSIONAL TRANSITIONS IN HEALTH-CARE

Conventional multistate life table accounting procedures ore bared on theoretical assumptions that are appropriate primarily for demographic events. Applying these approaches to the area of health care, however ; may lead to serious blares given the frequent turnovers of events su ch ar hospitalization curd institutionalization. in addition, traditio nal approaches have been criticized for failing to capture population heterogeneity. This research introduces a new algorithm to estimate mu ltistate life table indicators regarding health care use, taking advan tage of the availability of information on average lengths of stay in hospitals and nursing homes. The survival analysis approach is used to estimate age-specific transition probabilities in order to address th e issue of population heterogeneity.