Predictors of Household Spending on Out-patient Expenses in Kenya

Abstract

Spending on out-patient health care by citizens in limited resource countries has received little attention.The purpose of this study is to determine the predictors of household spending on out-patient expenses in a cross-sectional study in Kenya. We applied the GEE methods to determine the effect of various variables on outpatient care. We established that the best predictors for outpatient spending in Kenya are Age of the household head, wealth index, marital status and education, which had the lowest QICu of 976341.2. There were no differences on age in mean spending on outpatient care and was changing in a sinusoidal manner. The rich spend more on outpatient care, due to financial ability. Spending increased across the wealth quantiles while gender had a significant effect in the general performance of the models, it didn’t assist in lowering the QICu

Tweedie Model for Predicting Factors Associated with Distance Traveled to Access Inpatient Services in Kenya

“…Our data were clustered by counties; thus, an exchangeable correlation structure is the most flexible in modeling the association through the generalized estimation equations (GEE) approach. Notably, both independent [30] and autoregressive (AR) (1) [31,32] correlation structures under nonnormal responses have been considered. e independent structure assumes a weak correlation among the subjects in a cluster, and the number of clusters is small.…”