Financial impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on outpatient health care providers
Urban Kovac, Lukrecia Kovac Gerulova, Ivo Dolezal,Lucia Macegová
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic is an increasingly recognized problem and affects the health systems of individual countries. Healthcare has to face many challenges, which can also have economic consequences for healthcare providers. The economic performance of outpatient health care providers was assessed using the financial indicator of revenue for the years 2018 and 2019 before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and for the years 2020 and 2021 during the pandemic. For general practitioners for adults, the increase in year-on-year revenue was 15.8% (from 2018 to 2019), 10.01% (from 2019 to 2020) and 17.59% (from 2020 to 2021), respectively. The growth between 2019 in median revenue was up to 29.36%. The growth of median revenue for both fields was higher between 2020 and 2021. The median revenue of general practitioners for children and adolescents was the highest in the Bratislava region and the lowest in the Nitra region. The median revenue of general practitioners for adults was the highest in the Žilina region and the lowest in the Košice region. Revenues of general practitioners for children and adolescents reached statistically comparable revenues in 2019 and 2020, except for the Banská Bystrica region. All regions except the Trenčín region in 2021 achieved statistically higher revenues compared to 2019. Revenues of general practitioners for adults for the regions and both pandemic years were statistically higher between the reference year 2019 except the Nitra and Trenčín regions for 2020, where revenues were statistically comparable. During the COVID-19 pandemic, general outpatient care providers achieved an increase in revenues at the national and regional levels for 2021.