Evaluation of the impacts of selected socio-economic factors on healthcare quality at the country level and possible implications to COVID-19

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to define the socio-economic factors at the country-level that have an impact on healthcare quality which is measured by the health care index offered by the Legatum Institute, to analyze the effects of these indicators using the data from the 77 countries and to discuss the findings on the real case of “COVID-19”. In the study, 8 indicators were defined, which are “Patient Satisfaction”, “Current Health Expenditure”, “The Number of Beds”, “The Number of Doctors”, “ICT Development Index”, “The Burden of Government Regulations”, “Population”, “Research and Development”. In order to analyze the relationship between the indicators and healthcare quality, hypotheses derived from literature analysis were tested with OLS (Ordinary Least Squares) multiple linear regression method. While the results of analysis supported the predicted effects of all indicators on the healthcare quality, “The Number of Doctors”, and “Research and Development” demonstrated insignificant conclusions on the index.