Published June 17, 2025 | Version v1
Dataset Open

NHIF Bulgaria: Individually Approved Medicines under Ordinance β„–2 (Ex-Children's Fund)

Authors/Creators

  • 1. ROR icon Medical University Plovdiv
  • 2. Institute for rare diseases
  • 3. Medical University of Plovdiv, Center for Translational Neuroscience

Description

 

πŸ“Š Dataset Description

Title:
NHIF Bulgaria: Individually Approved Medicines under Ordinance β„–2 (Ex-Children’s Fund)

Summary:
This dataset contains records of individually funded pharmaceutical treatments under Ordinance β„–2 /27.03.2019 of the Ministry of Health in Bulgaria, previously known as the “Children’s Fund.” These are exception-based therapies provided outside the Positive Drug List (PDL) following a formal process of individual request, clinical justification, expert assessment, price negotiation, and decision by NHIF or the Ministry of Health.

The treatments included are often high-cost, rare-disease, or pediatric medicines that fall outside the standard reimbursement frameworks (KP/APR or regular outpatient reimbursements).

Key Characteristics:

  • Each record represents a patient-specific approval for a given therapy.

  • Medications may be off-label, not included in the PDL, or imported via special channels.

  • The dataset includes pediatric patients

  • The data was shared upon formal request by the author to the NHIF and released with Decision β„– Π Π”-19-219 on 10.05.2024.

⚠️ Important Note on the name Field:

The name field contains unstructured entries that require further cleaning and parsing for analysis:

  • Some records include multiple medicines per entry (e.g., "arsenic trioxide phebra 1mg., vesanoid 10 mg - 100br.")

  • There is variation in languages — some entries are in Bulgarian, others in English or in Latin (English transliterations)

  • Many entries contain both market names and INNs (e.g., "spinraza (inn nusinersen)")

  • Strings vary in language, formatting, and delimiter usage, making grouping or classification challenging

πŸ‘‰ Recommendation: Perform additional cleaning using regular expressions or named-entity parsing to extract structured medicine names for research or aggregation purposes.

Structure:

  • πŸ“¦ Rows: 2,485

  • πŸ“ Columns: 7

  • πŸ“† Period: May 2019 –  april 2024

  • 🌍 Coverage: National (all NHIF regions)

Variables:

Variable Description
date Date of funding approval for the treatment
name Name(s) of medicine(s) – may include INN, market name, or both
costs Total expenditure approved for the treatment (in BGN)
age Age of the patient at treatment date (years)
birth_date Date of birth of the patient
gender Gender of the patient (male, female)
region Region of birth (e.g., Sofia City, Haskovo, etc.)

Analytical Opportunities:

  • Monitoring of rare disease treatment access

  • Estimating budget impact of high-cost individual therapies

  • Identifying age-specific and regional access trends

  • Classifying frequently prescribed non-PDL therapies

  • Supporting policy evaluations and HTA modelling

Source:
National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF), Bulgaria
https://www.nhif.bg/

License:
Unless otherwise stated: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

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goverment_funded_medicines.csv

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