Health care utilization patterns in developing countries: role of the technology environment in "deriving" the demand for health care.

Health care services, in combination with several intermediate (proximate) determinants of health such as environmental sanitation and nutrition, directly influence health status. In the economics literature, this is referred to as the health production technology. Although many studies recognize that demand for health care depends on the health production technology, otherwise known as a "derived" demand, this review indicates that few of them have so far been able to fully incorporate this technology in estimating significant determinants of health care use. Understanding the technology environment could help explain why substantial portions of the population do not gain access to care even when financial factors do not appear to be a barrier. Also, low utilization of health services may simply reflect the low productivity of these services when other complementary factors such as nutrition or clean water and sanitation are lacking. Finally, since health-producing technology is often a multistep (multivisit) process, health care demand studies generally offer an incomplete picture of health care utilization patterns because they focus on a single event such as the first visit of an illness episode. Researchers should obtain more complete information on the interaction between all health production inputs, their availability and access to them. Multidisciplinary methodologies are likely to be useful.