Top PDF The effects of outpatient co-payment policy on healthcare usage by the elderly in Taiwan

Abstract Aging and declining health are intrinsically related and are resulting in increasing healthcare spending in many countries. Control of healthcare spending and patient usage behavior are linked. This study examines the healthcare usage behavior of chronically ill elderly patients in Taiwan following an increase in co-payments. The differences in usage behavior are interpreted by comparing the frequency of hospital visits and the types of hospitals chosen by patients before and after the implementation of the new co-payment policy. Claim data of the Taipei branch of the National Health Insurance Bureau (NHIB) is used as a basis for this analysis. Analysis results indicate that choice of hospital type by the elderly is affected by an increase in co-payment, but that difference of the hospital type choice before and after the co-payment increase is too small to be practically significant. However, the frequency of visits decreased significantly after the implementation of the new co-payment policy. Medical care costs per visit for individual patients and for the National Health Insurance system both increased significantly. Visit frequency and hospital type choice, as well as diagnosis and treatment cost and co-payment, all show significant differences among different age groups of the elderly. The effects of co-payment increases are also discussed from the viewpoint of patients and of governmental policy.

Abstract This study aims to analyze the ambulatory visit frequency and medical expenditures of the general elderly population versus the elderly with intellectual disabilities in Taiwan, while examining the effects of age, gender, urbanization and copayment status on ambulatory utilization. A cross-sectional study was conducted to analyze data from 103,183 national health insurance claimants aged 65 or older. A total of 1,469 had a principal diagnosis of mental retardation ( intellectual disability) and claimed medical outpatient services in 2007. The average number of ambulatory visits was 30.1±23.1, which is much higher than in the United States and other developed countries, and the mean annual visits of the elderly with intellectual disabilities was significantly higher than the general population in Taiwan (35.2±28.7 vs. 30.0±23.1). Age and copayment status affected outpatient visit frequency. The mean medical expenditure per visit and the mean annual outpatient cost were 1,146.5±4,497.7 NT$ and 34,533.7±115,891.7 NT$, respectively. Male beneficiaries tended to have higher average annual medical expenses and mean medical expenses per visit than female beneficiaries. The three most frequent principal diagnoses at ambulatory visits were circulatory system diseases, musculoskeletal system and connective tissue diseases and digestive system diseases.

Despite the above limitations, our study findings have important policy and research implications. The magnitude of patient transfer, our earlier documen- tation about costs per discharge, and documentation by other authors emphasize the need for the NHIRD to move towards providing patient-level data linked across databases to researchers. Until then, past stud- ies showing cost reduction for case payment items may be causing a false sense of complacence that case payment is the panacea to the problem of surg- ing healthcare costs. From a policy perspective, our study suggests that case payment diagnoses patients treated in the FP and NFP sectors are possibly incur- ring greater healthcare costs than in the public sector.

This study focuses on the factors that have a negative impact on the physical function of people 67 years or older in Taiwan. Under the condition of understanding human nature and health, we study the impact of the health behavior on the results of four scales that measure the general functionality of a person, namely: the Activities of Daily Living, the Instrumental Activities of Daily Living, the Nagi Scale , and the Completely Nagi Scale.

In a society where the norm of filial piety is strongly emphasized, such as Taiwan, support for the elderly mainly takes the form of living with the older person’s children and family has been a source of protection for older Taiwan. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of socioeconomic status and health on the transitions in living arrangements among the elderly in Taiwan.

The main purpose of this research is to investigate the impact of social-support system on life satisfaction of the elderly in Taiwan. Household-based convoy is used as a proxy of social-support system. Empirically, it is aimed to find out whether the four circles of the

2. It is also noteworthy that ‘Marketability of IPR’ and ‘Public acceptance’ draw more attention from the biofirm group than from venture capitalists. The biofirm group recognizes public concerns about biotechnology products such as gene-modified foods and human-cloning techniques, and mentions them as major barriers to the development of biotechnology, while venture capitalists do not. Some of the venture capitalists mentioned that public concern is not a big issue in Taiwan. Moreover, they think that such concerns revolve around only a small part of biotechnology products, and that there is still much room for developing biotechnology. This attitude may reflect the risk-taking characteristic of venture capi- talists. Similar to their counterparts in advanced economies, small biotechnology firms in Taiwan tend to develop their technology and look for opportunities to go public or to be acquired. The intellectual property rights of their technology are usually the most, and probably the only, valuable asset for going public or for being acquired, which probably explains why the biofirm group emphasizes the criterion of the marketability of IPR.

Abstract A novel CO 2 sensor was made by carbon nanotubes (CNTs). The CNTs were synthesized by catalystic thermal chemical vapour deposition at 700 °C. Prior to the synthesis, the Fe catalysts were pretreated by H 2 plasma for different times. Two terminal resistance of the as-grown CNTs mat was measured under different CO 2 concentrations. It was found that without the catalyst pretreatment, the sensitivity was about 4% when the CNTs mat was exposed to 800 mTorr CO 2 concentration. However, with various catalyst pretreatment times of 5, 10, 15 and 20 min, the sensitivity was 3.69%, 6.27%, 9.54%, and 12.1%, respectively. The Raman spectroscopy showed the I D /I G decreased from 0.668 to 0.539 as the catalyst pretreatment time increased. The XPS also showed the correlation of surface chemical components with the Raman spectroscopy. The Fe catalyst H 2 plasma pretreatment affected both the graphitization and surface binding sites of CNTs.

Background: The prevalence of overweight and obesity are growing progressively among the elderly (over 65 years). Underweight, even though it occurs in only a tiny fraction of the population, is actually associated with more excess deaths. Overweight, obesity, or underweight are not healthy body weight, which are both important risk factors for severe diseases and disability in the elderly.

recruited subjects were the cases that were referred from the long-term care center of Miaoli County to the hospital. The records of physical therapy outcomes were analyzed using the statistical analysis software, SPSS 13. Wilcoxon's test was used to analyze the difference in each item between before and after physical therapy. We also used Spearman's correlation coefficient to examine the correlation between the scales of the home-based assessment form and the Barthel Index.

We now turn to the risk-return trade-off. A basic economic insight is that eco- nomic agents who voluntarily take on more risk expect to be compensated by a higher return. In so far as sectoral or regional vulnerability to monetary policy shocks results from the free choice of employees regarding their occupation, the theory of compensating wage differentials would predict this risk to be priced. Note that it is hard for employees to diversify their human capital, in contrast to the ease with which investors can reduce risk by diversifying their financial assets. There is indeed some evidence in the literature that this risk is priced. For example, Abowd and Ashenfelter (1981) show that durable manufacturing industries and construction face higher unemployment risk than the government and the professional services industries and that the labor market offers compensating wage differentials.

The purpose of the study is to investigate the factors that influence the disables’ usage of computer/internet, and their education-need. The survey of disable people in the 2008 Digital Divide was used to explore the factors. The dataset was collected by RDEC (Research, Development and Evaluation Commission,

Addresses: [Tung, H.] Asia Univ, Wufeng, Taichung County, Taiwan Cited Reference Count: 0. Times Cited: 0[r]

Keywords: Mobile payment adoption, Consumer Trust, Mobile Technology Introduction The overall usage of mobile payment in Taiwan has increased rapidly since the launch of Apple Pay in 2017. Several mobile payment applications such as Apple Pay, Android Pay, Samsung Pay, JKOPAY and so on have been adopted by Taiwan consumers. However, given Taiwan consumers’ interest in mobile payment, the lack of consumer trust has been identified as the most significant barrier to the success of e-commerce and e-payment systems (Keen, 1997). Dahlberg (2003) also suggested including trust into the technology acceptance model to explain consumer adoption decision within the context of mobile payment solutions. Since consumer trust is one of the most important factors for consumers when considering using mobile payment, what contributes to consumer trust? This is the first research question we are going to address.

Responsibility of cisapride-erythromycin co-medication The potential hazard of drug–drug interaction could be easily avoided via proper intra-institutional monitoring mechanisms, which are already available in most of the hospitals in Taiwan. However, there still remains as high as 82%, cisapride-erythromycin co-medications originating from the smaller medical care units in the year 2000. This is probably due to the fact that most of the private clinics are lacking such risk monitoring mechanisms. The same doctors that prescribed both cisapride and erythromycin accounted for 62% of the total co-medication episodes (Table 5). The majority of these doctors (87%) were practicing in clinics, which interestingly, is higher than that of cisapride prescriptions (63%) in clinics from the same population. This trend indicates that not only institutional, but also personal factors play important roles in concomitant prescribing incidences in Taiwan. In view of this, it is imperative to establish more effective procedures to educate phys- icians in private clinics of updated medication infor- mation. Also of interest to know that physicians in clinics are allowed to hire pharmacist to dispense medication inside the clinics in Taiwan. The lack of an effective double-checking mechanism via the separation of dispensing from prescription may also be one of the contributing factors for cisapride-erythromycin co- medication in the clinics.

(5) Results of stepwise logistic regression analyses indicating that being high school graduateds and under, the Reserve, f amilies with smoking habits, higher (>50%) ratio of smoking[r]

The Effects of Exercise Training on Walking Functi on and Percetion of Health Status in Elderly Patien ts with Peripheral Arterial Occlusive Disease There are great impact on the walking function and perception of health status due to limited arterial blood supply to lower extremities and intermittent claudication among patients with peripheral arterial occlusive disease. However, studies regarding the effects of exercise training on the patients'' walking f unction and perception of health status are very rare in Taiwan. The purpose of this study is to explore the effects of exercise training on the walking function and perception of health status in elderly patients with peripheral arterial occlusive disease.

When considering context, it was found that nasal air- flow ceases before the end of words closed with a voiceless stop 共Nptk context兲, but continues after a word boundary in words closed with a voiced stop 共Nblg context兲. In other words, nasalization can cross over voiced consonants. It is proposed that there are speech aerodynamic reasons behind the different nasalization patterns observed in Nptk and Nblg contexts. First, from the point of building up intraoral air pressure, complete vocal-tract closure involving the oral cav- ity and the velopharyngeal port is necessary for voiceless stops to develop and maintain the required intraoral air pres- sure between the oral cavity and the atmosphere. Second, in reference to the maintenance of voicing, the opening of the velopharyngeal port during the production of voiced stops helps to release the supralaryngeal pressure, which must be lower than the sublaryngeal pressure, in order for pulmonic air to flow through the glottis and to cause the vocal folds to vibrate 共Ohala and Riodan 1979兲. Thus, for aerodynamic rea- sons, the closure of the velopharyngeal port leads to the ces- sation of nasality during voiceless stops, and the opening of the velopharyngeal port leads to nasalization during voiced stops.

ABSTRACT The study compared with first mover and late comer company who can get high performance in China. From the comprehensive literature review , we proposed the related framework of first mover advantages, late comer advantages and performance. The research purpose focus on : 1.the relationship between first mover advantages and performance. 2.how the moderating role of late comer advantages plays between first mover advantages and performance. The study collect 6 company of 3 industry as the sample for case study. By the timing they entry the China , we can distinguish first mover and late comer to compare with each other. And we can understand the first mover and late comer who can get high performance. Based on the interview, we found : 1.when first mover having higher first mover advantages , first mover can have higher market share and profitability. 2.when late comer advantages is high and make first mover advantages low, first mover can have lower market share and profitability.

Abstract Participation in leisure activities has a positive effect on the well-being of older people during their later years. Based on the theory of continuity, most older people will keep their previous hobbies and participating in leisure activities they have been participating since their young and mid-age years. The purpose of this study is to understand the participation in leisure activities and how age and health status changes might have an impact on the participation in leisure activities among the elders in Taiwan.