Thanks to the revision, there is now a clearer distinction between companies within the Human Health and Social Work Activities section and companies outside it, such as pharmacists and secondary healthcare providers. In addition, Human Health and Social Work Activities section (SBI divisions 86-88) is now described in full in the Health and Social Care Accounts. 

The Health and Social Care Accounts system used to produce the figures works with actors (categories of healthcare providers). After the revision, this system comprises 73 actors (annex 1), which are grouped in the 22 categories presented in the StatLine tables. The new classification is shown in the table below.

Some of the changes warrant further explanation:

1. Before the revision, independent medical specialists and dental specialists working in general hospitals were not included in the expenditure on general hospitals but in the expenditure on other suppliers of medical specialist care. This had come about for historic reasons, going back to a time when those independent medical specialists submitted claims to the insurance companies themselves. Now only the hospital submits claims and the independent specialists are, as it were, ‘subcontractors’. By including them with general hospitals, the approach in the Health and Social Care Accounts has now been brought into line with the approach in the Care Institutions statistics. Following the revision, independent medical specialists who work outside hospitals are still included with other providers of medical specialist care; independent dental specialists who work outside hospitals have been merged with dental practices.
2. The new classification contains a new Households category. This is for families that provide care via a personal budget (cash benefit; PGB). Before the revision, those households were classified under the healthcare providers providing the relevant type of care. For example: households that offer care for the disabled were grouped with companies offering care for the disabled. With the revision, which brings the Health and Social Care Accounts more closely into line with the SBI classification of providers, households are now classified separately, because they are not companies. For the time being, one exception has been made to this: households that provide children's day care continue to be subsumed under companies that provide children's day care, because it is difficult to properly establish the scale of the provision by households. The intention is to resolve this issue by the time of the next revision.
3. The pre-revision category ‘Other providers of healthcare’ has been scrapped, with the relevant actors being moved to categories that better reflect the nature of the care they provide.
4. It has been found that the ‘Umbrella organisations in the field of health care and other support activities for health care’ and ‘Community centres, other consultancy and cooperative bodies in the field of social care’ actors (subclasses 86929 and 88999, respectively), which before the revision had been included in the ‘Policy and management’ group, include many companies that provide care. The former belief that these two categories provide very little, if any, care themselves, instead of concerning themselves primarily with the organisation and financing of care, does not correspond with reality. ‘Umbrella organisations in the field of health care’ have therefore been moved to the new ‘Providers of other healthcare services’ category, while ‘Other welfare and consultancy’ has been moved to the ‘Providers of social work and other welfare’ category.
5. A separate category has been introduced for foreign health and social care providers. Although this category is limited in terms of size and the figures are subject to some uncertainty, it has been decided to make it separately visible because CBS is required to supply this category to Eurostat, which also publishes it.
6. There is an important difference in our approach to healthcare providers within Human Health and Social Work Activities section and providers outside it. For healthcare providers within the Human Health and Social Work Activities section, in principle all revenues are counted as care expenditure, unless it is known that they also provide non-care services and the value of those services cannot be determined. For providers of care outside the Human Health and Social Work Activities section, only the care expenditure revealed by claims (Zvw, Wlz, supplementary insurance schemes) or other sources, such as annual reports, is counted. This approach entails the risk of underestimating care supplied by providers outside the Human Health and Social Work Activities section. For example: a company that provides Wmo care but does not explicitly state this in its annual report – companies that only provide Wmo care are not subject to compulsory corporate social responsibility reporting under the WTZa – may remain unrecorded.
   The same is true of companies that provide uninsured care, including a significant number that provide cosmetic care. Analyses by CBS reveal that a proportion of those firms fall outside the Human Health and Social Work Activities section and are classified within the Beauty Care sector. This makes it difficult to fully reflect this care in the Health and Social Care Accounts, particularly if the companies in question do not explicitly report on their care activities.
7. The names of a few categories have been changed, not because the content has changed but because the new names better describe them:
   a. ‘Providers of nursing, care and maternity care’ instead of ‘Suppliers of nursing and care’;
   b. ‘Providers of prevention and public healthcare’ instead of ‘Providers of preventive care’;
   c. ‘Providers of social work and other welfare’ instead of ‘Providers of social work’.
   d. ‘Providers of medical appliances’ instead of ‘Suppliers of therapeutic devices’
8. The pre-revision category ‘Suppliers of medicaments’ has been divided up due to the new approach: a separate ‘Pharmacies’ category has been created, and the sale of medicinal products by supermarkets and drugstores now falls under the ‘Providers of care and welfare as a secondary activity’ category.
   The latter change may appear to be a backward step, given the fact that part of the expenditure on medicaments is now ‘hidden’ within a much broader category, but the opposite is true: because, since the revision, CBS is also publishing the provider*care type intersection, with medicaments being one of the care types, the information on expenditure on medicaments is now actually published in more detailed form than it was before the revision. The breakdown by care type is the subject of the next section.