An actuarial investigation into maternal out-of-hospital cost risk factors

Jananie William, Catherine Chojenta, Michael A. Martin and Deborah Loxton

Annals of Actuarial Science, 2019, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-35

Abstract: This paper adopts an actuarial approach to identify the risk factors of government-funded maternal out-of-hospital costs in Australia, with a focus on women who experience adverse birth outcomes. We use a two-phase modelling methodology incorporating both classification and regression trees and generalised linear models on a data set that links administrative and longitudinal survey data from a large sample of women, to address maternal out-of-hospital costs. We find that adverse births are a statistically significant risk factor of out-of-hospital costs in both the delivery and postnatal periods. Furthermore, other significant cost risk factors are in-vitro fertilisation, specialist use, general practitioner use, area of residence and mental health factors (including anxiety, intense anxiety, postnatal depression and stress about own health) and the results vary by perinatal sub-period and the patient’s private health insurance status. We highlight these differences and use the results as an evidence base to inform public policy. Mental health policy is identified as a priority area for further investigation due to the dominance of these factors in many of the fitted models.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:anacsi:v:13:y:2019:i:01:p:1-35_00

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Annals of Actuarial Science from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().