Abstract / Summary
Abstract Objective To analyze the dynamic trends and core influencing factors of hospitalization expenses for patients with schizophrenia, optimize the structure of medical costs, and provide evidence-based references for rational healthcare cost control, alleviating patients' economic burden, and improving medical insurance payment policies. Methods A total of 5,303 inpatients with schizophrenia admitted to a tertiary A-level psychiatric hospital in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Western China, from 2020 to 2025 were enrolled. Relevant information including hospitalization expenses was collected from the hospital information system. The structural change degree analysis was applied to dissect the dynamic evolution of hospitalization expense structure, and the Back Propagation (BP) neural network model was used to identify the key factors influencing hospitalization expenses. Results From 2020 to 2025, the average hospitalization expenses per admission for schizophrenia patients exhibited an initial increase followed by a decline and subsequent stabilization. Specifically, the proportion of pharmaceutical expenses decreased by 0.75%, rehabilitation expenses showed a negative structural change, while medical service expenses and laboratory/imaging test expenses presented positive structural changes. The contribution rate of chemical drug expenses to the overall structural change was only 2.8%. Length of hospital stay was identified as the most significant factor affecting hospitalization expenses. Conclusion The overall structure of hospitalization expenses for schizophrenia patients still needs further optimization. It is recommended to further promote the use of drugs from the national centralized procurement, optimize rehabilitation programs and service models, and expand the inter-provincial and inter-institutional mutual recognition of test results, so as to reduce the hospitalization burden of patients with schizophrenia.