NHIF Bulgaria: Expenditures and Patient Counts for Antineoplastic and Coagulopathy Medicines in Hospital Treatment

📊 Dataset Description

Title:NHIF Bulgaria: Expenditures and Patient Counts for Antineoplastic and Coagulopathy Medicines in Hospital Treatment(🇧🇬 ИЗВЪН СТОЙНОСТТА НА КП/АПР – Приложение 2)

Summary:This dataset contains detailed records of hospital-based expenditures and patient counts for antineoplastic (anti-tumor) medicines and medicinal products for congenital coagulopathies, reimbursed outside the value of clinical pathways or ambulatory procedures (КП/АПР) by the National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF) in Bulgaria.

The data corresponds to Application 2 of NHIF’s official reporting and provides insight into high-cost therapies administered in hospital settings across the country.

Key Characteristics:

Aggregated by hospital within Regional Health Insurance Offices (RZOK).

Linked to NHIF reimbursement codes and ICD-10 diagnosis codes.

Captures non-standard reimbursements, i.e. outside bundled pathway-based pricing schemes.

Temporal Granularity:

Data is available on a monthly basis, as indicated by the period variable.

Each row represents a hospital-level report for a specific month.

Data Cleaning and Preprocessing:

All character variables have been preprocessed with the following dplyr transformations to ensure consistency and reduce noise in downstream analyses:

mutate(across(where(is.character), ~tolower(trimws(.x)))) %>%
mutate(across(where(is.character), ~str_replace_all(.x, "[\"']", ""))) %>%
mutate(across(where(is.character), ~str_replace_all(.x, "\\\\s*\\\\s*", "\\\\"))) %>%
mutate(across(where(is.character), ~str_replace_all(.x, " - ", "-")))

This includes:

Lowercasing all strings

Trimming whitespace

Removing quotes (" and ')

Replacing multiple backslashes and redundant spacing

Standardizing " - " to "-"

Structure:

📦 Rows: 876,492

📁 Columns: 17

📆 Temporal coverage: From January 2021 onward

🌍 Geographical scope: All NHIF regions and reporting hospitals in Bulgaria

Key Variables:

Variable
Description

region_num
Code of the Regional Health Insurance Office (RZOK)

region_name
Name of the region

hospital_code
Unique code identifying the hospital

hospital_name
Name of the hospital

atc_code
Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) code

atc_name
International nonproprietary name of the substance

nhif_code
NHIF-specific code used for reimbursement

market_name
Commercial name of the product

packaging
Packaging description and dosage form

concentration
Strength or concentration of the product

num_in_pack
Number of units per package

icd_code
ICD-10 diagnosis code

icd_name
Diagnosis name (in Bulgarian)

patients_num
Number of patients treated

pack_num
Number of reimbursed packages

costs
Public expenditure for the product (in BGN)

period
Reporting period (first day of the month)

Use Cases:This dataset is suitable for:

Health expenditure analysis in oncology and rare coagulation disorders

Hospital-level treatment access monitoring

Geospatial and temporal health inequality studies

Pharmaceutical policy evaluation at the national and regional levels

Source:National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF), Bulgariahttps://www.nhif.bg/

License:Unless otherwise specified, shared under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)