Zi trend report: Increasing work intensification in medical and psychotherapy practices
12.12.2022 14:27
In contrast to the inpatient area, the total number of cases in outpatient care also increased significantly in the first half of 2022 compared to the comparable period in 2019. While this value was 4.8 percent across all specialist groups in the first quarter of 2022, it was 0.3 percent from April to June 2022. For comparison: In the first half of 2021, the use of statutory health insurance was still 2.8 percent below the level of the pre-pandemic comparison period.
Overall, the number of cases with personal doctor-patient contact among general practitioners was 3.7 percent in the first quarter and 1.9 percent in the second quarter of 2022 above the initial values from 2019. For pediatricians the utilization in the first quarter of 2022 was almost identical to the number of cases in the comparable period of 2019. In the second quarter, from the beginning of April to the end of June 2022, there was an increase of four percent. The number of cases among specialists in the first quarter of 2022 is also clearly higher than the comparable period in 2019, with an increase of 5.8 percent. In the second quarter of 2022, this is slightly higher than the level of the second quarter of 2019 at 0.4 percent. For psychotherapists, the increase in cases was well above average at 9.4 percent in the first quarter and 9.5 percent in the second quarter. There was particularly strong demand for group therapies (+38.5 percent for Q1 2022 and +48.5 percent for Q2 2022) and individual therapies (+6.2 percent for Q1 2022 and +5.8 percent for Q2 2022).
The commitment of general practitioners and specialists is also visible in the early detection examinations, which are so important for health prevention: Looking over the first half of 2022, the data for early detection colonoscopy shows (16.5 percent for Q1 2022 and 8.8 percent for Q2 2022) and early detection examinations in children (0.7 percent for Q1 2022 and 2.8 percent for Q2 2022) saw significant increases in cases compared to 2019. Only mammography screening (-1.2 percent for Q1 2022 and -2.7 percent). for Q2 2022) and skin cancer screening (-18.5 percent for Q1 2022 and -9.5 percent for Q2 2022) are below the baseline values from 2019.
These are the central results of the trend report published today by the Central Institute for Statutory Health Insurance (Zi) on the development of statutory health services up to the end of the first half of 2022.
“Our current data evaluation of contract medical and psychotherapeutic services for the first half of 2022 shows one thing more than clearly: thanks to over 183,000 practicing doctors, psychotherapists and their highly committed practice teams, outpatient care will continue to run at full capacity even after the pandemic has subsided. The fact that the use of around 100,000 practices has increased on average by up to five percent during the expiring corona pandemic sends a strong signal for standard medical care. In comparison, the number of cases for inpatient treatment in hospitals recorded a significant decrease of 14 percent in 2021. This further sharpens our awareness of the fact that outpatient medicine received a boost from the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021. “The significant development of standard outpatient care ultimately confirms the high level of trust the population has in medical care provided by doctors’ practices,” said Zi CEO Dr. Dominik von Stillfried.
With a total of around 1.6 million video consultation hours billed in the first half of 2022, there is once again a significant increase compared to 2019 (first half of 2019: 804 video consultation hours). We also see a strong increase in telephone consultations in the first half of 2022 compared to 2019: from January to June 2022, a total of 4.3 million telephone consultations were billed, 1.9 million more than in the same time frame in 2019.
For the current trend report, 16 of the 17 statutory health insurance associations provided the Zi with aggregated information from the billing data from the first quarter of 2019 to the second quarter of 2022. The data was evaluated to answer the question of how the number of cases and the number of billing doctors as well as the frequencies of certain service categories changed in 2020, 2021 and 2022 compared to 2019. The report follows on from the results of the Zi trend report for the full year 2021.