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A New Paradime of Medical System
IT Embraces Health Insurance Review
and Assessment Services
Full-scale expansion of the DUR (Drug Utilization
Review) service, an intelligent support system
for prescription drugs
The number of chronically ill patients has continued to grow in
tandem with a rapidly aging population and changes in lifestyles.
In particular, as the number of patients with more than two
chronic illnesses goes up, patients often have to visit multiple
medical institutions. The problem is that doctors and pharmacists,
uninformed of the patient's previous medical history, might
prescribe medicine the patient has already taken. As a result, the
patient can end up taking excessive amounts of medication and
be in danger of suffering from side effects overdosing. To address
such issues, the Korean government and Health Insurance
Review and Assessment Service (HIRA) have scaled up the DUR
(Drug Utilization Review) system -- a prescription drug support
service aimed at ensuring the safety of prescribed drugs-- since
December of this year. Then, what is DUR (Drug Utilization
Review)? What kind of impact will it have on our lives?
Emergence of the DUR service
as a new medical measure and
the current situation of IT medical systems
"The DUR service is a preventative safeguard against overlapping
medication prescriptions and misuse of medications: realtime
information related to the safety of medications pops up on
PC monitors to prevent doctors and pharmacists from prescribing
and dispensing medication inappropriately. For example, the patient's
previous medical records and information on medication
that should not be taken together is provided," said Kang Yoongoo,
President of Health Insurance Review and Assessment
Service (HIRA). "Doctors examine patients and issue prescriptions
after they confirm whether problematic drugs were excluded
with the help of the DUR system. Then, pharmacists take a second
look at the prescription via the DUR system and dispense
medications to a T. In other words, the DUR system is a real-time
medical system which prevents the issuance of overlapping prescriptions.
Therefore, the DUR system preempts the misuse of
medication by providing information on whether the same drug
was prescribed twice or whether certain drugs that are harmful to
the patient were included in the prescription. At the moment, the
DUR system can identify the drugs that should not be taken together,
those harmful to children and pregnant women as well as
over-prescribed drugs. In the future, the DUR system will get
more sophisticated to screen out possible dangers at the stage of
prescribing medications," added President Kang. Health
Insurance Review and Assessment Service (HIRA) has put in
place the DUR system since 2008. Since December of this year,
prescriptions issued by different doctors which overlap have been
examined by the DUR system. By March of next year, all the
medical institutions and pharmacies in the nation will be
equipped with the DUR system, and large general hospitals will
fully employ the DUR program by December of next year owing
to preparations for system setups. In short, the DUR system is a
medical service that ensures safer issuing of prescriptions.
Building of an advanced assessment system
through IT
On top of that, the Health Insurance Review and Assessment
Service (HIRA) has been running an intelligent, scientific assessment
system that is capable of handling nearly 1.3 billion cases of
medical treatment information annually. President Kang said,
"To enhance the accuracy and credibility of assessments, we
adopted the DW system earlier than any other public institution
to lead by example. HIRA is currently contemplating the adoption
of "mobile offices", an IT trend brought on by the government-initiated
smart work initiative. Also to that end, we are upgrading
the current assessment system into a Web-based one.
Leading smart medical culture by capitalizing
on SNS and blogs
By taking advantage of the vast amount of information on useful
medical services, offered by HIRA, everyone can become a
smart medical consumer. A case in point is HIRA's online magazine
"Health Narae" (http://z.hira.or.kr/index.do), designed for
smart medical consumers. "At http://z.hira.or.kr/index.do, information
on cooking, travel, TV dramas and leisure is provided
by each sector's best power bloggers. In particular, the Hospital
Search Service of the Webzine is useful: if visitors type in obstetrics
and gynecology, well-reviewed news reports related to pregnancy
and infant rearing are recommended. It is a so-called intel-
42 KOREA IT TIMES | December 2010