Oslo Economics has, on behalf of the Association of Manual Therapists’ Service Office, carried out an analysis of the course of treatment and costs in the field of physiotherapy. The analysis has mainly been prepared on the basis of administrative register data from KUHR (Control and payment of health reimbursements).
Every year, approximately 440,000 Norwegians seek out a therapist in the field of physiotherapy with partial funding from Helfo. There are three types of practice in the field of physiotherapy with such reimbursement: physiotherapists, manual therapists and psychomotor physiotherapists. These use partly common and partly different treatment methods to treat overlapping types of ailments. We show that there is a difference in the course of treatment across the types of practice for selected diagnoses, both in terms of the length and cost of the treatment. The manual therapists have on average the shortest course of treatment, while the physiotherapists, who often have a lower level of education and lower rates, have the lowest average costs associated with reimbursements and deductibles for their courses of treatment. If we take into account the therapists’ municipal operating subsidy, the manual therapists have lower or approximately as low costs per course of treatment as the physiotherapists, depending on how the municipal operating subsidy is estimated in our analyzes.
The report can be downloaded here .
