NHIF Bulgaria: Individually Approved Medicines under Ordinance №2 (Ex-Children's Fund)

📊 Dataset Description Title:NHIF Bulgaria: Individually Approved Medicines under Ordinance №2 (Ex-Children’s Fund) Summary:This dataset contains records of individually funded pharmaceutical treatments under Ordinance №2 /27.03.2019 of the Ministry of Health in Bulgaria, previously known as the “Children’s Fund.” These are exception-based therapies provided outside the Positive Drug List (PDL) following a formal process of individual request, clinical justification, expert assessment, price negotiation, and decision by NHIF or the Ministry of Health. The treatments included are often high-cost, rare-disease, or pediatric medicines that fall outside the standard reimbursement frameworks (KP/APR or regular outpatient reimbursements). Key Characteristics: Each record represents a patient-specific approval for a given therapy. Medications may be off-label, not included in the PDL, or imported via special channels. The dataset includes pediatric patients The data was shared upon formal request by the author to the NHIF and released with Decision № РД-19-219 on 10.05.2024. ⚠️ Important Note on the name Field: The name field contains unstructured entries that require further cleaning and parsing for analysis: Some records include multiple medicines per entry (e.g., "arsenic trioxide phebra 1mg., vesanoid 10 mg - 100br.") There is variation in languages — some entries are in Bulgarian, others in English or in Latin (English transliterations) Many entries contain both market names and INNs (e.g., "spinraza (inn nusinersen)") Strings vary in language, formatting, and delimiter usage, making grouping or classification challenging 👉 Recommendation: Perform additional cleaning using regular expressions or named-entity parsing to extract structured medicine names for research or aggregation purposes. Structure: 📦 Rows: 2,485 📁 Columns: 7 📆 Period: May 2019 – april 2024 🌍 Coverage: National (all NHIF regions) Variables: Variable Description date Date of funding approval for the treatment name Name(s) of medicine(s) – may include INN, market name, or both costs Total expenditure approved for the treatment (in BGN) age Age of the patient at treatment date (years) birth_date Date of birth of the patient gender Gender of the patient (male, female) region Region of birth (e.g., Sofia City, Haskovo, etc.) Analytical Opportunities: Monitoring of rare disease treatment access Estimating budget impact of high-cost individual therapies Identifying age-specific and regional access trends Classifying frequently prescribed non-PDL therapies Supporting policy evaluations and HTA modelling Source:National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF), Bulgariahttps://www.nhif.bg/ License:Unless otherwise stated: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)