Bird’s-eye view of Slovenian pediatrics reveals complexity but also consistency

Abstract

With a population of only around two million, Slovenia has a total of 14 hospitals with a pediatric or a neonatal unit, which is significantly above the European average of such units per capita. This begets the question whether such a high density of pediatric units is needed, and whether this is optimal in terms of responsibly spending the national healthcare budget. While in-depth answers to such questions require lengthy on-site evaluations of experts and healthcare professionals, many insights can nevertheless be obtained from a bird’s-eye perspective, statistically studying large databases and looking for complexity and order in them. To that effect, we here study five years’ worth of diagnosis across ten of Slovenia’s pediatric and two neonatal units, looking in detail at the number of hospital treatments per patient each diagnosis required, their distributions, and the comparisons of these data across the units. We find evidence of power laws in the distributions, thus indicating some form of self-organization behind the emergence of various diseases and the resulting treatments. We also show that the ratios between the number of times a given diagnosis has been made and the required number of treatments are, apart from rare exceptions, rather consistent across all the units. Our research thus affords the conclusions that, at least from afar, Slovenian pediatrics is managed well and consistently, to the point of complexity manifesting in the distributions across various cross-sections of the studied data.