Breeding of dairy cattle is focused comprehensively on production and functional traits, including of health. Indices are regularly updated due to the constant development of farming and breeding. The aim of the study was to update the partial health index (HI) which was introduced for the Holstein breed 5 years ago. The current production, economic and genetic parameters of the breed and the basic principles of the selection indices theory were taken into account in the work. Several variants of selection were tested – based on the current composition of the SIH and HI index and their optimization. In all variants, the selection gain per cow and generation interval was desirable for health traits, i.e. it resulted to the stabilization of the diseases occurrence, or to its slight reduction on farm. Direct selection for health would result in more intensive health improvement while maintaining the gain in the current goals. Simultaneously, the economic response and reliability of the animal selection would be increased (by 1% to 28% and by 2 to 25 percentage points based on the selection variant, respectively). The proportion of health traits in HI could be optimized to the ratio of 38% for clinical mastitis and 62% for claw diseases.