The government has played its ace in the hole to attract foreign patients and revitalize the economy - telemedicine. The issue of telemedicine health insurance coverage is still up in the air. The major difficulty is that patients have to be furnished with communication infrastructure beyond the normal standards in order to use such a system.

The Ministry of Health, Welfare and Family Affairs announced policy amendments on the 28th of July that allow telemedicine services between patients and doctors. It is accepting public opinion on the subject until August 17, 2009.

According to the amendment, telemedicine is for patients who live in places where medical services are not usually offered nearby or those who are disabled, targeting about 4.7 million people. People who are equipped with computer terminals, an Internet connection, standard equipment such as blood pressure monitors and blood sugar monitors, and can read medical charts may reserve medical examinations and get treatment through a video conference. Either a proxy can receive the prescription or the prescription can be sent to the patient’s chosen pharmacy.

Under the current Korean Medical Law Section 34, doctors or experts can only give medical support to each other. The Ministry is expecting that this change can help to not only give early diagnosis and take quicker emergency measures, but also to help related manufacturers and communication providers grow as well. Furthermore, the Ministry explained that related fields can use up to 15,000 jobs annually.

Telemedicine appeared on the market quite a while ago. For several years, the information and communication industries developed technologies related to the U-health industry, a ubiquitous health care industry which allows patients to receive medical services through home networks. Even construction companies began to design apartments with such medical systems and services five years ago.

However, the effect has been minimal because such medical services were not covered by health insurance, resulting in a lot of money spent. The critics point out that this amendment may not change the result after all, because it does not guarantee health insurance coverage.

Even if Congress passes the amendment, the applicability of it will be decided by separate health related committees. If patients can receive services under regular health insurance coverage, such coverage will require a huge budget to cover 4.7 million people. The Ministry is predicting that 85%, or 3.5 million people, intend to participate, and is expecting that 7.5% of the 3.5 million will actually participate in the program. Considering that the entire population receives medical treatments an average of 14.7 times annually, the health insurance budget will require W200 trillion (US$161.4 billion). Building electronic dispatch systems and buying the equipment to give medical treatments can also cost a maximum of W10 trillion (US$8.07 billion). The Ministry stated, “It is true that if health insurance does not cover telemedicine, we have no need to adjust our budget, however, the problem of that is that services will not be expanded.” He further said, “We are trying to find an optimal level of planning the budget as it can be changed when planning for base rates.”

The actual participation rate is still in doubt because the participants need to have computer terminals, Internet connections, and standard equipment such as blood pressure monitors and blood sugar monitors; they also need to be able to read medical charts. In a place where finding a hospital is difficult, it would be even more difficult to find such equipment and have an Internet connection. Moreover, blood pressure monitors and blood sugar monitors can cost several hundred thousand won, making it harder for people to participate. After setting an experiment, the result shows that only 7.5% of prisoners actually participated. This result is the reason for the government to set the target rate of 7.5%. Kangwon Kangreung, Choongnam Boryung, and Kyungbook Youngyang regions are currently analyzing the service participant rates.

The Ministry said, “After the analyzing the data, telemedicine reduced to 76 minutes of medical accessibility from 445 minutes of that before.” Plus, it stated that “... considering the reduction of transportation fees and the time consumption, a 61,000 won increase of cost-benefit analysis is expected, so we plan to pass this amendment to carry out this plan by the second half of next year.”