The government has begun assessing the status of intensified care units to establish an integrated management system nationwide and use it to improve medical fees for ICUs.
Song Young-jo, director of the Emergency Medicine Division of the Ministry of Health and Welfare, made this statement on Wednesday while briefing journalists on the “Intensive Care Unit Management System Project.”
The project aims to establish a pilot project for monitoring medical information in intensive care units and a mid- to long-term ISP (informatization strategic plan) as the organization to carry out the project. This year's budget is 1.3 billion won ($887,070).
“"The project aims to assess the ICU capabilities of each hospital and establish a standardized management system,” Director Song said. “Currently, ICU capabilities vary widely across hospitals, including the Big Five (five largest hospitals), high-level general hospitals, and general hospitals. It is also impossible to regularly identify what level of ICU each hospital has built and what operating system it has.”
Song added that through the project, the government will go beyond the structural parts, such as equipment and staffing levels, to understand how hospitals treat patients with varying degrees of severity through ICUs and their capabilities.
Song explained why the project is called a “pilot project”: it is not just about identifying the situation but also about building an integrated management system.
“If you look at emergency rooms, an information system based on the Emergency Medicine Act has been established and managed, but ICUs are managed by each hospital because there is no legal basis,” Song said, adding that the ministry also does not have an integrated system for managing ICUs nationwide.
Even during the Covid-19 pandemic, he said that hospitals had to individually check how many ICUs they had, what kind of patients they could accept, and so on. In the long run, the government needs an integrated management system that goes beyond checking the status of ICUs.
“To set up the system, we need to know the situation of each hospital, but we cannot proceed (with the project) based on the law as it is now,” Song said/ “Therefore, we prepared a plan through a pilot project last year to secure the relevant budget.”
“We will start collecting information from the first half of this year, but it may not be enough because there is less than a year left,” he said. “We will have to extend the project, collect data as we proceed next year, and expand it to ISPs.”
The pilot project will collect data from more than 30 tertiary general and general hospitals nationwide. While there is no immediate incentive for these hospitals to participate in the pilot, according to Song, they will benefit in the long run.
“We are strengthening the compensation for ICUs through the commercial restructuring support project, comprehensive secondary general hospitals, and improving the number of ICUs,” Song said. “It’s not a quid pro quo for information, but it should be understood as a status check to expand support.”
ICUs are the core of essential medical care, but compared to emergency rooms, we have no information and do not manage them as well. He noted that it is difficult to see the effect of increasing the number of ICUs in this situation.
“We expect to see changes in the future if we systematize information through the pilot project,” Song said. “The current ICU standards are only the minimum ones for their existence, and we need to identify the level for quality improvement and appropriate compensation.”