The requirements of the elderly in health care partly differ from those of younger persons, regarding their restricted mobility and their multi-morbidity. The aim is to survey the actual care of the elderly based on linked billing data of the HVB (data source: GAPDRG). In this way these differences are going to be known and can be taken into account in the areas of prevention and organization, as well as in supply structures. Apart from the analysis and presentation of detailed outcomes these investigations might be helpful in their function as augmentation to the standard methods of the HVB (BIG). The analyses and methods can furthermore be reused.
Persons who are 60+ years old on the qualifying date of the 1st January 2006 are analysed in the following ways:
The regional categorization of the utilization behaviour of the elderly for selected specialities. Here the number of the contracting parties, the services, the patients, the contacts and the services of every doctor, as well as the number of doctors per 10.000 inhabitants are calculated for particular specialities (including general practitioners, eye specialists, dentist, neurologists etc.) for every district, every quarter and every cluster. Furthermore, the proportion of male and female patients is taken into account, as well as the average SES of the past. This makes it possible to present a picture of elderly’s health care in Austria.
The evaluation of the medical services obtained by older patients in the area of primary care. This analysis is made out of two steps, that are used for all specialities in all Austrian regions:
a) Services of general practitioners and their frequencies are analysed for persons who at least lived until the monitoring period (2006 and 2007), categorized into age groups. Here the number of services provided for the patient groups, categorized for 5-year steps is determined for every medical service position and compared with the number of persons in every age group.
b) Services of general practitioners and their frequencies are analysed for persons who died in 2007: the same is done, analogous to a), with persons who died in 2007. For these persons the services of the general practitioners in the last four quarters of their life are presented in a tabular manner. Here, the medical service position is used for analysis. The quarter in which the patients died is used as a full quarter. Therefore the influences of uncertainties by coding are minimized, through differentiated divergence resolution of the individual carriers in the GAPDRG.