Improving Korean Service Delivery System in Health Care: Focusing on National E-health System

Recently the Korean government has been promoting national e-health project to systemically build an integrated health care system from 2004 to 2010. The e-health project could realize Electronic Health Record (EHR), telemedicine, technology standardization, and technology interoperability by sharing medical information and technology among hospitals. Via such innovation, total reform of the existing health and medical system could be carried out. Therefore, many positive outcomes generate such as improvement in health care system, increase in patients’ accessibility of medical care and satisfaction, enhancement in medical equality, improvement in medical quality, reduction in costs, and business rationalization of hospitals. From the national perspective, the project is anticipated to improve transparency by overcoming inequality of healthcare system, and enhance accountability by providing well structured health administrative services. However, to support e-health project it is necessary to solve information security issues such as protecting the privacy of personally-identifiable health records and preventing discrimination based on genetic information. Moreover, the policy priority should be creating legal and institutional environment in order to establish sensible cooperation among medical and governmental organization.