• Health Policy and Management
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.311-325
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• 2020

Background: Health statistics of pharmaceutical use and expenditure are essential to make and implement evidence-based pharmaceutical policy. This study aims to demonstrate the methods and results of pharmaceutical consumption and sales in 2018 according to the sources and methods given by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Methods: The medication list contains 39,346 medicines both reimbursed and non-reimbursed by the National Health Insurance in 2018. We used the therapeutic categories based on Anatomic Therapeutic Chemical Classification of World Health Organization. This study analyzed National Health Insurance claims data and supply data generated from wholesalers to health care facilities. The indicators are defined daily dose (DDD), per 1,000 inhabitants per day and US$ per capita. Results: In South Korea, the number of medications to which DDD were assigned was 18,055 and it was 45.9% of the total number of medications on the list. The consumption in anti-infective for systemic use (J) and musculo-skeletal system (M) was higher than the mean consumption among the OECD countries. The pharmaceutical sales per person in Korea was also higher than the mean sales per person across the OECD countries. Conclusion: We sought to explain the methods to produce pharmaceutical consumption and sales statistics which we had submitted annually to OECD. Considering the characteristics of pharmaceutical statistics, a direct comparison should be approached with caution. Since the growth in pharmaceutical spending has greatly increased over the past decade, we need to monitor pharmaceutical consumption and expenditure consistently.

• Journal of Evidence-Based Herbal Medicine
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.17-26
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• 2008

Nowadays the flow of international trade is that there seems to appear economic block significantly because most countries contract FTAs, so our market condition is changing to a severe competitive situation. Korea which has 70% of foreign dependence of trade must get involved in regionalism, and also actively promote FTA more than any other countries. FTA on February in 2006, the pharmaceutical industry are anxious. The pharmaceutical industry in Korea has recently come to a crisis that it is hard to expect a growth due to structure of profit and a change for the worse of management. If Korea-U.S. FTA are contracted in this kind of situation, domestic pharmaceutical companies will be at stake. We can anticipate that FTA with the country that has a strong competitive power like U.S. affect negatively on pharmaceutical industry, because the industry doesn't have enough self-competitiveness. Considering this kind of surroundings, we need to present the policy to enhance competitiveness for damage limitation on pharmaceutical industry by Korea-U.S. FTA. Under this background, this research has groped for a direction to strengthen the competitiveness to develop pharmaceutical industry in quality. The competitive enhancement plan is presented which is divided into the government policy part, the R&D part, and the management part. Although Korea-U.S. FTA is analyzed to wither the pharmaceutical industry, it would be thought that it is a good chance to upgrade domestic pharmaceutical industry if we make the best use of it, and also to make in roads into foreign market.

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.48-65
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• 2003

Detailed analyses of total health expenditure and its sub­categories are essential for the evidence­based health policy(EBHP). These analyses, again, should be based on timely and reliable data that are comparable across countries. The System of Health Accounts (SHA), published by the OECD in 2000, provides an integrated system of comprehensive and internationally comparable accounts. The author has implemented the SHA manual into Korean situation, and examined overall expenditure estimate and its basic functional breakdown following the manual. This study explains how pharmaceutical expenditure is estimated. The results are, then, analyzed particularly from the international perspective. Both administrative data in Statistical Yearbooks (National Health Insurance, Medical Aid, Industrial Accident Compensation Insurance) and survey data on Health and Nutrition are used for the estimation. Per capita pharmaceutical expenditure in Korea (183 US$ PPPs) was far less than the OECD average (308 US$ PPPs) in 2001, but pharmaceutical expenditure share in total health expenditure (20.3％) was higher than the average (16.7％). This can be explained by the fact that there is a statistically significant correlation between pharmaceutical expenditure share and per capita GDP of each country. Korean people follow the tendency of relatively low­income countries to spend less than OECD average for health care, but follow again their tendency to spend more on drugs than on other health care services. In consideration of results and analysis as above, per capita pharmaceutical expenditure in Korea is expected to grow in the future, but the growth rate of the pharmaceutical expenditure is expected to be less than that of overall health expenditure.

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.179-194
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• 2011

Although there have been studies regarding the separating policy of dispensary and medical practice, little study have provided a concrete empirical evidence to what extent the policy objectives are achieved. In this paper, we try to provide empirical evidence whether the policy separating dispensary from medical practice achieved the policy objectives, which representatively are reducing the mis-use or over-use of anti-biotic prescriptions and medicines, and decreasing the government spending for the cost of pharmaceutical support. By comparing the average of the rate of change of the number of medicines prescribed, the rate of anti-biotics prescribed, and the government spending for the cost of pharmaceutical support between the areas where the separation policy was implemented and the exceptional areas, we concluded that it is difficult to conclude that the policy separating dispensary and medical practice achieved its policy objects, as it first announced to achieve in the introduction of the policy in 2000. However, the limitation of this study is that the data, that can thoroughly analyze the effect of separating policy of dispensary from medical practice, cannot be collected as expected. Hence, we could not use a parsimonious empirical model to evaluate the effect of the policy introduced in 2000. Rather we used a simple statistical method to extract enough empirical evidence fro m the data available. In the near future, we would expect to see more research that analyze the exact effect of policy separating dispensary and medical practice with concrete empirical model using more sophisticated dataset.

• Korea Journal of Hospital Management
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.37-51
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• 2002

It has been 2 years since the implementation of the separation of prescription and drug dispensing policy. This study analyzes the effects of the policy on the job contents and personnel structure of hospital pharmacy. The main purposes of the analysis are to determine if the policy has causes the increase of professional activities of pharmacists in hospital and to investigate whether the hospital pharmacy is equipped with enough manpower to provide high quality pharmaceutical service as intended by the policy. The level of professionality of pharmacists' activities is measured by the number of activities of direct involvement in inpatient care such as participation in patient rounding, medication consultation, the number of hospital committee the pharmacists involved and the number of continuous education pharmacists took. The adequacy of personnel structure to provide high quality pharmaceutical care is measured by the level of compliance to the governmental standard of hospital pharmacy personnel. In order to collect the data, surveys were performed for two periods: year 1999 (before the implementation of the policy) and year 2001 (after the implementation of the policy). The results show that the pharmacists' participation in inpatient rounding decreased and that the inpatient medication history management activities, operation of ward pharmacy, participation in hospital committee increased. In personnel structure, the average number of pharmacist per hospital decreased and the number of prescription processing per pharmacist increased. Based on the results this study concludes that the professional activities of hospital pharmacists has increased a little and there were structural changes in hospital pharmacy service activities to increase the professionalism in providing care. However, the pharmacy departments were understaffed hampering the strive to increase the provision of professional pharmaceutical service in hospitals.

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.97-106
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• 2015

Background & Methods: The purpose of this research is to estimate the efficiency of the pharmaceutical firms and the determinants of their efficiency. Stochastic frontier analysis(SFA) and panel study are applied to the data of 60 domestic pharmaceutical firms from 2006 to 2012. Results & Conclusion: First, the result of the stochastic frontier analysis shows that overall efficiency of the pharmaceutical firms is increasing as time goes by. However, if firms are classified by the scale, the larger firms show more efficiency and if classified by the degree of innovativeness, the innovative firms show more efficiency compared to the non-innovative firms. This evidences show that the scale and R&D investment have significant relationships with the efficiency of the pharmaceutical firms. Therefore, it is necessary to increase the national level of investment for the fundamental researches to vitalize R&D of the new drugs. Second, the result of estimation of the determinants of efficiency shows that the firms with larger sales promotion expenses and entertainment expenses have less efficiency compared to the other firms. This can be explained by the structural characteristics of the small generic pharmaceutical firms. Therefore, the government had better make the pharmaceutical firms to reduce sales promotion and entertainment expenses and increase R&D expenses by introducing systems such as global budgeting system on medicine or reference pricing system.

• Proceedings of the PSK Conference
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.114-115
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• 2005

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.58-77
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• 2004

Cost containment has become high political issues since financial crisis of the Korean Health Insurance fund in 2000. Korean Government has developed and implemented several measures to reduce the pharmaceutical expenditures. Pharmaceutical economic evaluation can be a tool in decision to allocate scare resource efficiently. In order to increase the quality of economic evaluation for pharmaceuticals, the Korean Health Insurance Review Agency(HIRA) is considering the development of a guideline for economic evaluation. It mandates that pharmaceutical companies could submit the result of an economic evaluation when demanding reimbursement of new pharmaceutical drugs. The purpose of this study is to provide a critical review of the economic evaluations of health care technologies published in the Korean context whether they have been performed according to current guidelines and therefore whether their results are directly useful for decision making. We found there exist important problems and deviation from, good practice' both in the general features of the studies, like the study design and perspective, and in terms of cost measurement and valuation. There are needs to develop clear guidelines and to educate and train researchers in performing economic evaluations.

• STI Policy Review
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.87-112
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• 2017

This study analyzes patenting practices in the pharmaceutical industry and the impacts of sequential innovation. The main argument of the research is that strategic patenting is common in the pharmaceutical sector and it is legal within the context of patent law. However, when these practices have negative effects on the competition process post-grant, the practices that are legal under patent law may come into conflict with antitrust laws, which are not applied. The study brings into question whether sequential patenting practices characteristic of the pharmaceutical industry encourage or discourage innovation, and moreover, the overall functionality of the patent system. Ultimately, the functionality of the patent system creates market incentives that neglect consumer, i.e., patient, welfare; potential solutions to deal with the shortcomings are discussed.

• Korean Journal of Social Welfare
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• v.57 no.3
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• pp.5-30
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• 2005

Globalization has conflicting effects on pharmaceutical policies. A change into a 'populist competitive nation' due to globalization strengthens policies to reduce drug manufacturing costs while the WTO's TRIPS Agreement that is affected by multinational pharmaceutical companies increases drug manufacturing costs by bolstering the patent rights on new drugs. Currently, the independency of populist nations' policies to reduce drug manufacturing cost is being compromised because multinational organizations(such as the European Union) which represents the interests of the multinational pharmaceutical companies put restrictions on the pharmaceutical policies of populist nations for purposes of promoting the industrial goals of the multinational companies. Korea is no exception. Up until the late 1990s, the main feature of the pharmaceutical policies in Korea was keeping the drug price at the cost level based on a growth-driven ideology, and this was Korea's unique policy tools as a developing nation. However, the increase in the power of multinational pharmaceutical companies currently infringes on the independency of Korea's pharmaceutical policies. Expensive imported drugs were originally covered by the national health insurance plan, but starting from 1999 such drugs began to be covered by the plan. After separation of medical and pharmaceutical services, the use of expensive drugs was increased, and the Korean government planned to introduce the reference price policy in order to contain the cost of the national health insurance plan. However, due to pressures from the U.S. government as well as multinational pharmaceutical companies, implementation of the policy has been postponed. In addition, due to a pressure from the U.S. government, a working group was created which would affect the health care policy of the Korean government. Discussions so far on globalization was about whether the change into populist competitive nations due to globalization resulted in the reduction of welfare spending. However, this study shows not only the reduction of health care cost through policies to reduce drug manufacturing costs but increase in welfare spending by raising the strengths of multinational pharmaceutical companies that are for-profit providers of welfare service. While focusing on the contradictory effects of globalization on pharmaceutical policies of a nation, this study looked at how these conflicting effects end up promoting the interests of multinational pharmaceutical companies by examining the Korean case.