The Evaluation of Prescription Refills for Chronic Diseases: The Case of Type II Diabetes Care

• Main Authors: Yi-Jing Kuo, 郭奕靚
• Other Authors: 鄭守夏
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2012
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/52789769968061336341

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 健康政策與管理研究所 === 100 === According to the statistics of the Department of Health, the prevalence of diabetes is about 4.3% in Taiwan and there are about 1 million diabetes patients. For taking care of chronic disease patients, the Bureau of National Health Insurance implemented the prescription refill policy. However, diabetes has been a heavy burden of the health care system in Taiwan. This research is conducted to evaluate the impacts prescription refills has on the health care resources utilization and the health care outcome in Taiwan. We use the NHI claims data from 2003-2005, identifying different prescription-refill-usage characteristics into 3 groups: the sustain-use group, the intermittent-use group, and the never-use group. We choose the never-use group as the control group and select the intervention group from the sustain-use and the intermittent-use group by propensity score matching to construct a comparable matching group. The total sample size is 49680 (16560 each group). Subsequently, we take a generalized equation estimate (GEE) approach to compare the likelihood of the health care resources utilization and the health care outcome among the three groups. While using the diabetes related hospitalization and emergency utilization as the indictors of the health care outcome, the frequency are the sustain-use < the intermittent-use < the never-use group (p<0.01). On the other hand, the health care resources utilization is sustain-use < the intermittent-use< the never-use group (p<0.01) as well. That is, diabetes patients who using prescription refills have better health care outcome and lower health care resources utilization in Taiwan.