COVID-19 Response Capability to Be Evaluated When Designating Tertiary General Hospitals

Ministry of Health to Accept Applications for Tertiary Hospitals Next Month... Designation by Year-End
"Excluding COVID-19 Patient Ratio Cases from Evaluation to Prevent Disadvantages"

Medical staff are practicing patient treatment simulations in the COVID-19 patient ward set up at Seoul St. Mary's Hospital in Seocho-gu, Seoul. Photo by Hyunmin Kim kimhyun81@

[Asia Economy Reporter Choi Dae-yeol] The government has decided to introduce measures that encourage responses to the novel coronavirus infection (COVID-19) in the evaluation process for designating tertiary general hospitals, which will be applied for three years starting next year.

The Ministry of Health and Welfare announced that it has finalized the criteria for the 4th designation of tertiary general hospitals and will announce the designation plan from the 30th. Tertiary general hospitals are general hospitals that specialize in providing highly complex medical services for severe diseases, designated every three years by the Minister of Health and Welfare. At the first designation in 2012, there were 44 hospitals, and currently, 42 are designated. When designated, a 30% additional rate by hospital type is applied, and some fee items are increased.

In accordance with the government's ongoing medical delivery system improvement measures, indicators have been revised to allow large hospitals to focus on treating severe patients. The proportion of severe patients among inpatients will be raised from the previous minimum of 21% to 30%, and the full score criterion for relative evaluation will be increased from 35% to 44%. Severe patients refer to inpatients belonging to specialized treatment disease groups, such as rare diseases, diseases with high mortality rates, diseases with difficult diagnosis, and those requiring research.

Conversely, efforts are made to reduce the number of mild patients. The proportion of mild patients among inpatients and outpatients will be lowered from the previous 17% to 11%, and new relative evaluation criteria have been established. For example, if the proportion of mild outpatients is between 4.5% and 11%, a score between 10 and 6 points is given.

Regarding COVID-19 response, some exceptions are recognized to allow active treatment. For adult and pediatric intensive care units or neonatal intensive care units, at least one dedicated specialist must be assigned, but if they were deployed for COVID-19 treatment, assigning substitute specialists or residents will be recognized as meeting this criterion. Additionally, COVID-19 patients are excluded from the patient composition ratio evaluation count. Since most COVID-19 patients are classified as mild, there was a high risk of disadvantage in the tertiary general hospital evaluation; excluding them allows large hospitals to actively accept COVID-19 patients. This includes confirmed cases, suspected cases, and symptomatic individuals under investigation.

The government also prepared preliminary evaluation indicators before reflecting them in the 5th evaluation indicators to be applied from 2024. They will review the ratio of mild outpatient referrals and the level of inpatient dedicated specialist deployment, which are currently in pilot projects. Furthermore, intensive care unit beds (ratio) and negative pressure isolation beds (securing rate) used for infectious disease patient treatment will also be included in the evaluation indicators. These will not be applied in the current evaluation but are procedures to gauge the current level of medical institutions before reflecting them in the next evaluation.

Medical institutions wishing to be designated can apply by mail or email from the 1st to the end of next month. After document and on-site investigations, selections are planned around the end of December this year. Oh Chang-hyun, Director of Medical Institution Policy at the Ministry of Health and Welfare, said, "As we promote fee restructuring to allow tertiary general hospitals to focus on severe treatment, we hope that hospitals with high-level treatment of complex severe diseases, education, and medical service quality will be designated and contribute to establishing the medical delivery system."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.