The impact of COVID-19 on private healthcare service utilisation: time series analysis in the capital region of Finland during 2020-2022.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Most current studies on COVID-19 have focused on the first weeks or months of the pandemic or have addressed specific diseases. The long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on healthcare services are insufficiently understood. We analysed the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on outpatient healthcare utilisation in the full spectrum of diseases in Uusimaa, the capital region of Finland.

Methods

Our data included 632 466 individual patients between the ages of 18 and 65 and 6 521 394 visits to healthcare personnel from electronic health records. We fitted an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model to pre-2020 data to predict the expected quantity of diagnoses for the period between 1 January 2020 and 16 June 2022. Expected and observed qua

SUBMITTER: Niemenoja O 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11549829 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature