Financing Regimes and Case-Mix Complexity in Psychiatric Hospitals Beyond the Pandemic Shock-Insights from a Regional...

Background/Objectives: The COVID-19 pandemic intensified concerns regarding the resilience and financing architecture of mental health services, yet it remains unclear whether crisis-induced adjustments fundamentally altered hospital case-mix complexity or merely exposed pre-existing structural configurations. This study examines the relationship between financing regimes and case-mix complexity in psychiatric hospitals in Romania, a Central and Eastern European health system characterized by mixed financing arrangements and pronounced interregional heterogeneity. Methods: Using administrative data comprising 752 hospital section-year observations (2019-2024), we identify structural financing-organization regimes through a two-step clustering procedure (hierarchical Ward method followed by K-means refinement) based on revenue composition, expenditure allocation, workforce structure, and operational pressure indicators. Results: Three distinct regimes emerge, reflecting persistent institutional configurations rather than temporary crisis-induced groupings. Chi-square tests confirm that regime membership is statistically independent of pandemic timing. A multivariate regression model controlling for financing composition and expenditure structure shows that structural variables (particularly the share of contract-based revenues and the allocation of expenditures) exert systematic and economically meaningful effects on the case-mix index (CMI). Pandemic and post-pandemic indicators do not retain robust explanatory power once structural determinants are accounted for. Regional robustness analyses further demonstrate that financing architecture consistently outweighs temporal shock effects in explaining territorial variation in clinical complexity. Conclusions: The findings suggest that psychiatric hospital case-mix dynamics are structurally embedded within differentiated financing regimes whose influence persists beyond crisis periods. By integrating regime identification with outcome modeling in a Central and Eastern European context, this study contributes to the international literature on health system resilience and highlights the primacy of institutional financing architecture over episodic shock effects in shaping hospital complexity.