Health status estimation on the basis of MIMIC-health care models

In this paper we propose a new method for deriving health indexes from MIMIC-health care models. This method differs from the traditional approach in that the health indexes are not based on the causes of health but on transformations of the health indicators. These transformations are employed mainly to correct for the effects of variables which do influence the health indicators but not health status, H*, itself, like availability of medical specialists. The method is applied to a MIMIC-health care model, which is estimated on a Dutch database. The estimated parameters of this model and the derived health indexes may be used in future research to collect only those health indicators and related variables which appear to contain relevant information on H*.