DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15677504
title: NHIF Bulgaria: Expenditures and Patient Counts for Antineoplastic and Coagulopathy Medicines in Hospital Treatment

description: 📊 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)