Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the services provided by the Peruvian health system: an analysis of people with chronic diseases

Abstract

During the pandemic, many individuals with chronic or infectious diseases other than COVID-19 were unable to receive the care they needed due to the high demand for respiratory care. Our study aims to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on services provided to people with chronic diseases in Peru from 2016 to 2022. We performed a secondary database analysis of data registered by the comprehensive health insurance (SIS), the intangible solidarity health fund (FISSAL), and private healthcare institutions (EPS), using interrupted time series analysis. Our study identified 21,281,128 individual users who received care. The pooled analysis revealed an average decrease of 1,782,446 in the number of users receiving care in the first month of the pandemic compared with the expected values for that month based on pre-pandemic measurements. In addition, during the pandemic months, there was an average increase of 57,911 in the number of new additional single users who received care per month compared with the previous month. According to the time-series analysis of users receiving care per month based on each chronic disease group, the most significant decreases included people with diabetes without complications and chronic lung disease.