In the period June–October 2022, data were collected from the National Endoprosthesis Registry on the total number of beneficiaries of elective primary and revision surgeries from the 120 orthopedic-traumatology hospitals/departments in Romania, after which their statistical processing was performed. The data were collected, preprocessed and filtered in Microsoft Excel, then transferred to GNU PSPP and Matlab for further processing.
For the elective hip and knee procedures: cemented hip, uncemented hip, partial hip, hybrid and reverse hybrid, cemented knee, hip revision, and knee revision, we examined the monthly trend in the number of surgeries in 2019 (Table 2 ), 2020 (Table 3 ), 2021 (Table 4 ), and 2022 until 1 September (Table 5 ).
We also collected the number of patients who presented monthly on an outpatient basis and who had surgery recommendations, for each of the 7 types of elective interventions, from which by combining we obtained the total number of recommended interventions in outpatient wards at ECCH. Then, for the patients who underwent one of the 7 surgical interventions studied, we collected the duration of hospitalization of the operated patient and the number of cases discharged at home.
At the end, from the financial reports of the hospitals, we extracted the average costs of the 7 types of elective interventions that we used in the economic calculation regarding the revenues recorded by the hospitals.
The methodology for processing the collected data consisted of a separate analysis for each of the seven studied issues.
In the analysis of the volumes of elective procedures of hip and knee, as there was a strong effect of the month of the year, we also calculated the three-month moving average (MA) of the number of cases of each of the 7 types of elective procedures of hip and knee to more easily examine any potential time trend during the quarter. In the analysis of the length of the operated patient’s hospital stay we calculated the average values of the hospitalization durations.
Statistical analysis was performed with Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox Version 12.3 from Matlab R2022a (The Math Works, Inc., Natick, MA, USA).
For the elective hip and knee procedures: cemented hip, uncemented hip, partial hip, hybrid and reverse hybrid, cemented knee, hip revision, and knee revision, we examined the monthly trend in the number of surgeries in 2019 (
We also collected the number of patients who presented monthly on an outpatient basis and who had surgery recommendations, for each of the 7 types of elective interventions, from which by combining we obtained the total number of recommended interventions in outpatient wards at ECCH. Then, for the patients who underwent one of the 7 surgical interventions studied, we collected the duration of hospitalization of the operated patient and the number of cases discharged at home.
At the end, from the financial reports of the hospitals, we extracted the average costs of the 7 types of elective interventions that we used in the economic calculation regarding the revenues recorded by the hospitals.
The methodology for processing the collected data consisted of a separate analysis for each of the seven studied issues.
In the analysis of the volumes of elective procedures of hip and knee, as there was a strong effect of the month of the year, we also calculated the three-month moving average (MA) of the number of cases of each of the 7 types of elective procedures of hip and knee to more easily examine any potential time trend during the quarter. In the analysis of the length of the operated patient’s hospital stay we calculated the average values of the hospitalization durations.
Statistical analysis was performed with Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox Version 12.3 from Matlab R2022a (The Math Works, Inc., Natick, MA, USA).
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