Towards an Integrated Health Information System in Korea

Report

13 May 2022

Executive summary

Twenty-first century health systems will be built around data and information. The Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare commissioned the OECD to review the management and use of health data in Korea, and to recommend changes that would enable creating a health information system that supports achieving national health policy objectives.

An integrated health information system would help Korea improve its capacity to get the best performance and value out of its health system in three ways. First, it would directly improve care quality (including safety, effectiveness and efficiency). Second, it would improve patient empowerment by enabling people to access their own health information and for this information to “follow the patient” wherever they seek care. Third, it would raise the country’s capacity to use health and other data for important secondary purposes, such as continuous assessment of health system performance.

A range of data assets are relevant to an integrated health information system. For Korea this includes data generated during acute‑ and long-term health care, data on public health and social care as well as other relevant data sources such as social, economic and environmental data.

The OECD reviewed the health information infrastructure in Korea using the OECD Recommendation on Health Data Governance as a framework. It drew information from interviews and focus groups with Korean experts from academia, business, and government and from OECD and other surveys and reports.

Building on the strengths of Korean health data infrastructure and addressing challenges

Korea has taken great strides towards creating a health data infrastructure conducive to a high-performing, modern health system. Its insurance claims data, in terms of timeliness, coverage, volume and detail, are among the best in the world. Korea reports excellent data availability, maturity and coverage of key health datasets compared to other OECD countries. Korea is also among the countries with the strongest data governance across key national datasets.

Korea implemented a unique Drug Utilisation Review system that provides a prospective, real-time review of drug prescriptions to minimise the risk of safety harms such as contraindications, drug/drug interactions or ingredient duplication. Korea is developing a comprehensive chronic disease management system by integrating patient data from multiple organisations. Korea’s Benefits Information Analysis System already demonstrates many of the principles and requirements of using data to enable continuous improvement.

For research and statistics, Korea is quite advanced in creating an intermediary solution to improve health data interoperability through a Common Data Model (CDM) and has coded national health insurance claims data as well as 40 hospitals’ clinical data to the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) CDM.

While Korea has many advantages, a learning health system will not develop without building more trust, a fundament requirement for harmonising and sharing data while protecting privacy and data security. The obstacles that need to be overcome are a lack of social licence and incentives toward data sharing and collaboration, the lack of a framework for research access to data, incoherent EMR systems and a lack of patient-reported data, and laws or their interpretation in practice that block progress toward a learning health system.