(Finance) – In 2022 31 private healthcare workers examined they totaled revenues for 10.6 billion eurosup by 2.7% on 2021 and 8.7% on 2019. These variations compare with the 6.6% drop recorded in 2020, due to the partial suspension of healthcare activities, and with the rebound in 14.5% occurred in 2021. The diagnostic operators they grew by 22.3% on 2019, thanks to the exceptional demand for swabs and molecular tests during the pandemic, the solution of which in fact produced a drop in revenues of 8.1% on 2021; followed by hospital operators (+10% on 2019) and nursing home managers (+4.1%). The latter benefited from the increase in the occupancy rate of beds in RSAs (on average above 90%) and from the opening of new facilities which continued even during the pandemic. The recovery, however, did not materialize for rehabilitation players (-0.4% compared to 2019).
These are some of the numbers that emerged from the reportMediobanca Research Area publishes the update on the major private healthcare operators in Italy which analyzes the main groups with individual turnover exceeding 100 million.
There profitability overall, still lower than pre-pandemic levels, suffered a further setback in 2022, affected by inflation: the net operating margin (MON) contracted by 60.4% on 2019 and by 49.7% on 2021 and the Ebit margin fell to 1.8% from 3.8% in 2021 and, above all, from 5.3% of 2019. With reference to individual specialties, hospital care and rehabilitation closed 2022 with a negative current result, more markedly for the latter (-6% versus -0.3%). Diagnostics, despite sharing the contraction in margins, achieved the highest Ebit margin (11.1%). However, this sector is affected by the consequences of the Ministry of Health Decree of June 2023 which regulates the new nomenclature for specialist outpatient and prosthetic care, with expected average cuts on the tariffs of the main services of around 30%. The entry into force of the decree, initially set for April 2024, has been postponed to January 2025.
L’last line of the income statement aggregate of the 31 operators is negative by 38 million, bringing the number of businesses in the red in the four-year period to two (after -53.9 million in 2020). There are 14 groups that closed 2022 with a loss (there were five in 2021). The aggregate ROE, already decreasing from 5.9% in 2019 to 4.1% in 2021, falls further to -0.8% in 2022. The best net profitability is recorded by: Centro di Medicina (22.2%) , Humanitas (13.4%), Eurosanità (9.5%) and GHC (8.3%) in hospital care, Synlab (39.2%) in diagnostics and San Raffaele di Roma (36.3%) in rehabilitation.