Evidence of a broken healthcare delivery system in korea: unnecessary hospital outpatient utilization among patients with a single chronic disease without complications.

This study aims to estimate the volume of unnecessarily utilized hospital outpatient services in Korea and quantify the total cost resulting from the inappropriate utilization. The analysis included a sample of 27,320,505 outpatient claims from the 2009 National Inpatient Sample database. Using the Charlson Comorbidity Index (CCI), patients were considered to have received 'unnecessary hospital outpatient utilization' if they had a CCI score of 0 and were concurrently admitted to hospital for treatment of a single chronic disease - hypertension (HTN), diabetes mellitus (DM), or hyperlipidemia (HL) - without complication.

The costs of hepatitis A infections in South Korea.

Objectives: The incidence of hepatitis A infections among young adults has recently increased in South Korea. Although universal vaccination has often been suggested to mitigate the problem, its rationale has not been well-understood. Estimating the societal costs of hepatitis A infections might support the development of intervention strategies.

[Effects of community-based case management program for clients with hypertension].

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to analyze effects of a community-based case management program for clients with hypertension living in the community.

Methods: The research design was a one group pre and post-test design with 30 participants with hypertension who agreed to participate in the 8-12 week case management program provided by case managers from the National Health Insurance Corporation in 2002. Data were collected three times, before and after the case management services, and 6 months later.

[Introduction of health impact assessment and healthy cities as a tool for tackling health inequality].

In order to reduce the health inequalities within a society changes need to be made in broad health determinants and their distribution in the population. It has been expected that the Health impact assessment(HIA) and Healthy Cities can provide opportunities and useful means for changing social policy and environment related with the broad health determinants in developed countries. HIA is any combination of procedures or methods by which a proposed 4P(policy, plan, program, project) may be judged as to the effects it may have on the health of a population.