• Health Policy and Management
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.4-11
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• 2016

Background: Hospital admissions for ambulatory care sensitive conditions (ACSCs), which are widely used as an indicator of poor access to primary care, can be used as an efficiency indicator of healthcare use in countries providing good access to health care. Korea, which has a national health insurance (NHI) system and a good supply of health care resources, is one such country. To quantify admission rates of ACSC and identify characteristics influencing variation in Korean health care institutions. Methods: By using NHI claims data, we computed the mean ACSC admission rate for all institutions with ACSC admissions. Results: The average ACSC admission rate for 4,461 institutions was 1.45%. Hospitals and clinics with inpatient beds showed larger variations in the ACSC admission rate (0%-87.9% and 0%-99.6%, respectively) and a higher coefficient of variation (7.96 and 2.29) than general/tertiary care hospitals (0%-19.1%, 0.85). The regression analysis results indicate that the ACSC admission rate was significantly higher for hospitals than for clinics (${\beta}=0.986$, p<0.05), and for private corporate institutions than public institutions (${\beta}=0.271$, p<0.05). Conclusion: Substantial variations in ACSC admission rates could suggest the potential problem of inefficient use of healthcare resources. Since hospitals and private corporate institutions tend to increase ACSC admission rates, future health policy should focus on these types of institutions.

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.115-124
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• 2016

Background: This study aims at making a survey on health care service providers' cultural competence and making an appraisal of Chinese medical tourists on service quality, health care service providers' cultural competence, perceived value, and satisfaction. Methods: The data was collected from August until November, 2014 and 150 health care service providers and 65 Chinese medical tourists from 12 medical institutions in Daegu were enrolled in analysis. Results: The results showed that health care service provider's knowledge on Chinese culture was very low with 33.5% of correct answer. Health care service providers were found to get 3.82 point on a 5 point-scale in cultural perception, 3.53 points in cultural sensitivity, and 2.85 points in cultural skills. Chinese medical tourists were analyzed to give 4.08 points on a 5-point scale to satisfaction on health care service, followed by 4.01 points to health care service quality, 4.00 points to perceived value of health care service, and last 3.85 points to a health care service providers' cultural skills. However, there was a difference in points in cultural skills between health care service providers and Chinese medical tourists. Chinese medical tourists' satisfaction with health care service in Daegu was found to be comparatively high, but in relation to satisfaction with communication, it was found to be relatively low. Conclusion: Through this research, health care service providers' knowledge level of Chinese culture and cultural skills were low while they seemed to take a half-hearted attitude towards educational experience for building up cultural competence and foreign patient service response.

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.396-412
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• 2014

Background: As a reform plan of health care system, Accountable Care Organization (ACO) has became an object of attention in the United States after Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was enacted. ACO is a group of various health care providers and provide coordinated care to its assigned beneficiaries. If ACOs improve the quality level and reduce the cost of care, they can get financial incentives. Under the discussion for a quite long time and demonstration projects, ACO has been established. We aimed to analysis and discuss the history, policy mechanism, contents, status and outcomes of ACO. Also, we intended to suggest political implication Korean health care system with regard to ACO. Methods: We searched the articles related ACO in PubMed and selected several available papers about ACO. Total 56 studies were reviewed and categorized three parts; demonstration projects for formation of ACO, policy mechanism and agenda, empirical results of ACO performance. Results: As a result, establishment of ACO was successful partly in the US. It seems to be due to various project and pilot test for verification in the long time. The empirical effect of ACO was also identified in a few study but it needs more evidences to judge its positive effect. Conclusion: In Korea, there are arguments for the application of ACO. However it is difficult to implement a ACO by different political conditions between Korean and US. Nevertheless ACO proposed us the necessity of paradigm shift in our health policy and could be significant to national policy orientation in the future.

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.367-379
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• 2014

Background: Over the last decade, medical tourism industry has grown in Korea. Especially the number of Mongolian medical tourists has increased rapidly. Therefore, the Mongolia is one of the targets for Korea medical tourism. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of destination image and expected attributes of medical services on Mongolian's intention to use Korean medical tourism service. Methods: This study empirically collected survey data from Mongolian lived in Mongolia. The study analyzed the data using a PLS model. Results: Our results are as follows. First, the country image didn't significantly have causal effects on expected medical service quality and perceived risk. Second, tourism image (e.g., entertainment, economic feasibility, and local convenience) has significantly causal effects on expected medical service quality and perceived risk. However, tourist site as tourism image didn't significantly have causal effects on expected medical service quality and perceived risk. Third, medical image made a statistically significant effect on expected medical service quality and perceived risk. Fourth, the expected medical service quality showed a significant effect on intention to use Korean medical tourism service. Fifth, the perceived risk of medical tourism showed a significant effect on the reliability of medical tourism, but didn't show a significant effect on the intention to use Korean medical tourism service. Finally, the reliability has a significant effect on the intention to use Korean medical tourism service. Conclusion: From our empirical results, this study concluded that as a strategy attracting Mongolian patients, it is more effective to strengthen Korean hospital image and tourism image than Korean country image.

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.24-34
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• 2014

Background: Bankrupted households have recently been increased due to excessive medical expenditure in Korea. They have not been protected from economic risk when household's member has severe diseases that need a lot of money for treatment. Purpose of this study examines policy effect by comparing unmet needs' change of policy object households and non-object groups. Methods: We used Korea Health panel 2nd 4th data collected by Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs and National Health Insurance Service. Analysis subjects were 381 households (pre-policy) and 393 households (post-policy) that had cancer and cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases. Since it was major concern that estimates benefit strengthening policy started by certain time, we setup comparing households which had diabetes, hypertension disease. Comparison subjects were 393,247 households, respectively and we evaluated policy effect using difference in difference (DID) model. Results: Although unmet needs of policy object households were higher than non-object groups, policy execution variable affected negative direction. But interaction-term which shows pure effect of policy was not statistically significant. We utilized multi-DID model to examine factors affecting unmet needs causes. Copayment assistance policy did not significantly affect households that responded to 'economic reason,' and 'no have time to visit' for unmet needs causes. Conclusion: The second copayment assistance policy did not significantly give positive effect to beneficiary households than non-beneficiary groups. When we consider that primary purpose of public insurance guarantee high medical expenditure occurred by unexpected events, it needs to deliberate on switch of benefit strengthening policy that can assist vulnerable people. Also, we suggest that government forward a policy covering non-reimbursable medical expenses as well as switch of benefit strengthening direction because benefit policy do not affect non-covered medical cost which accounts for quarter of total health expenditure.

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.47-55
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• 2014

Background: Korea is considered to have an integrative health system where both western medicine and Korean (traditional) medicine are officially recognized and provided. Although Korean medicine has been covered by National Health Insurance over 20 years, equity in the utilization of Korean medical care has rarely been examined. Methods: We examined medical care utilization and expenditure of outpatient Korean medicine using panel fixed effects model to remove selection bias. Then we compared it with pooled ordinary least square (OLS) model. This study used Korea Health Panel data, which provides accurate information on out-of-pocket health care payment, including non-covered medical services. Results: Principal findings indicate that the frequency of the utilization of Korean medicine is related with unobservable individual choices different from western medicine, so the panel fixed effect model is appropriate. But pooled OLS model is better fitted for the expenditure of Korean medicine, after controlling for western medical care expenditure. After adjusting for the selection bias, socioeconomic status (income, education) was significantly associated with the expenditure of Korean medicine, but not with the frequency of the utilization of Korean medicine. Conclusion: This study shows that expenditure of Korean medicine utilization is inequitable across socioeconomic groups, which implies that health insurance coverage of Korean medicine is not sufficient.

• Journal of Korean Academy of Nursing Administration
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.401-414
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• 2005

Purpose: This study was to evaluate the utilization of health care service and to provide supportive data for health care policy making in one urban area in Korea. Method: This study tested the significance of public health service using the database of an university hospital and public health center from Feb. 2000 to Dec. 2004. Data were analyzed by multidimensional analysis and data mining technique and produced the information on the classification of utilization characteristics by main disease and the total cost of use and disease association with the users of the public health center. Results: The Results were as follows: 1) Top 10 diseases in the area accounted for 22.4% of total frequency for the most recent 5 years in university hospital, while 59.0% in public health center. 2) There were significant correlations between university hospital and public health center user's insurance type and place of residence: It showed higher use of public health center for free service beneficiaries residing in Seoul than residents in nearby or local area. The medical insurance types for hospital users were more various than those for public health center users. 3) The use of hospital for patients of hypertension, diabetes mellitus and hyperlipidemia was tended to concentrate in mostly autumn and winter since August 2000, while the cost of using public health center for those patients has been steadily reduced since July 2000. 4) As a result of cluster analysis, there were classified into three homogeneous groups according to the total cost of using public health service, age, and the frequency of use. 5) The association analysis on patients with chronic disease in public health center produced a detailed information on accompanying diseases related to the incidence rate of disease of high frequency due to aging, information on drug abuse and immune disease. Conclusion: The health care policy for local community should be evaluated continuously. And the policy to build an integrated data warehousing by public health indicator system and to enhance the faithfulness of data is required.

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.161-175
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• 2005

Since the introduction of mandatory health insurance in In, the Korean national health insurance(KNHI) has grown rapidly. In 2004, about $96.9\%$ of the total population are covered by the KNHI and the remaining $3.1\%$ by the Medical Aid program. Despite national health insurance system in Korea, private health insurance market has grown rapidly. In 2004, the size of the private health insurance market was estimated at 6,568 billion won. The purpose of this study Is to identify the factors that determine the purchasing decisions of supplementary private health insurance under mandatory national health insurance system in Korea. The data from n04 Busan Health Survey were analysed for the Purpose. The variables in this study are demographic factors, health status and health behavioral factors, health care systemic factors, and socioeconomic factors. For statistical analyse, we used logistic regression. The Findings show that female, economically active age group(especially 35-49 years), persons with better health status or experience of health screening test are more likely to purchase private health insurance. And higher household income and expenditure, higher education level are more associated with the increased probabilities of private health insurance purchases. This results imply that the expanding of private health insurance market could widen the gap between the have and have-not in terms of equal health care accessibility.

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.16-36
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• 2005

Due to the existence of asymmetry of information between doctor and patient, it has been believed that doctor might affect patient's decision making process of purchasing medical care. Based on this notion, doctor's reimbursement method has been suggested as an effective policy device of improving efficiency of patient's medical care use by way of its affecting doctor's practice pattern. By using the Community Tracking Study (CTS) household and physician data set, which includes not only various information on patient's medical care use, but doctor's practice arrangements and sources of practice revenue, this paper investigates the effect of community doctor's characteristics of reimbursement method on community patient's medical care use under the control of patient's socio-demographic characteristics and community doctor's practice type. In the process of estimating econometric model, the endogeneity problem of individual health insurance purchase was corrected by using 2818. And due to the existence of sample selection problem, Heckman's two-step estimation method was used for strengthen the robustness of estimation which was adversely affected by sample selection problem The empirical results show that as the average value of community doctor's portion of practice revenue determined by prospective method out of total revenue increases, the community patient's total out-of-pocket medical cost decreases. This results suggest, as doctor's practice revenues are mainly determined by prospective method, such as capitation, doctors would be more conscious about practice cost, which might affect doctor's practice pattern and by which his/her patient's use of medical care would decrease.

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.1-15
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• 2005

The aim of this study was to compare medical cost of hospice care and that of conventional care during the last year of life, and identify factors that influenced the cost. From January to August 2003 592 terminal cancer patients receiving care from 5 hospice care units and 2 hospice care teams in general hospitals were enrolled to case group. Two hundreds and seventy two terminal cancer patients receiving conventional care from 7 general hospitals were enrolled to hospital-based control group, and 1,636 terminal cancer patients from 122 general hospitals located in same regions with the 7 hospitals were enrolled to community-based control. We used characteristics and medical cost from data of National Health Insurance Cooperation. Total medical cost per beneficiary in cases was about 10 millions won, 14.5 millions in hospital-based controls and 11.1 millions in community-based controls. The hospice care saved $45\%$ over the last year of life compared with hospital-based controls (p<0.0001). Saving of inpatient cost account for approximately $80\%$ of saving per beneficiary. Hospice care saved $29\%$ of medical cost per hospitalization day compared with hospital­based controls and $17\%$ compared with community-based controls (p<0.0001). Multiple regression analyses showed that hospice care significantly saved the medical cost. This study suggest that hospice care save medical cost compared with hospital-based control and community-based control. Most of saving of inpatient cost account for approximately $80\%$ of saving of medical cost.