Objective:
The purpose of this study is to statistically analyze the gender, age, and address of patients who visited 21 centers of 11 departments of the Daejeon Korean Medicine Hospital for 3 years from January 1, 2018 to August 31, 2020. Based on the analysis results, this study aims to compare the demographic characteristics and differences of patients before and after COVID-19 through statistical analysis.
Methods:
This study retrospectively analyzed the medical records of 249,686 patients who received outpatient and inpatient treatment at Daejeon Korean medicine hospital of Daejeon University for 3 years from January 1, 2018 to August 31, 2020. Data were classified by year, month, new/old type, gender, age, and region. IBM SPSS Statistics ver25.0. was used for the analysis of clinical data.
Results:
1. As a result of analysis by gender, the rate of new patients after COVID-19 outbreak was similar to that of the previous year. The old patients showed an increase in the rate of visits by men and a decrease in the rate of visits by women.
2. As a result of analysis by age group, the number of patients in their 20s and 50s decreased in both the new and old. Patients over the age of 60 showed a slight decrease or an increase in some centers.
3. As a result of regional analysis, the number of new patients from Daejeon increased compared to before COVID-19, and the rate of visits by new patients in other regions decreased. There was no difference in the rate of visits to Daejeon and other regions of the old patients from the previous year.
4. In the case of inpatients, the analysis of the number of patients by gender, age group, and region showed that most centers had similar gender, age group, and regional ratios as in the previous year.
Conclusions: After COVID-19, the number of outpatients decreased by 2.6%. In particular, the percentage of female visits decreased, and the percentage of patients in their 20s to 50s decreased significantly. Also, the percentage of new patients from other regions showed a tendency to decrease.
Inpatients decreased by 8.6% compared to before COVID-19. Also, gender distribution, age distribution, and regional distribution were similar to those before COVID-19.