The government has begun verifying the adequacy of the Yoon Suk Yeol administration’s healthcare reform projects, including restructuring tertiary general hospitals and supporting comprehensive secondary general hospitals.

The Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service (HIRA) put the “Commissioned research on the effectiveness of medical delivery system improvement and development of medical cooperation quality indicators by supporting the structural transformation of tertiary general hospitals” until Monday.

The tertiary general hospital restructuring support project has been effective since October 2024. Its goal is to reduce the amount of medical treatment for moderate and below by reducing the number of general beds in senior general hospitals and focusing on severe, emergency, and rare diseases.

The comprehensive secondary general hospital support project, which enables secondary hospitals to focus on essential functions, such as moderate patient care and 24-hour medical care, and the enhancement of essential specialized functions support project will be implemented starting in July of this year.

HIRA believes that developing evaluation indicators that can validate whether the policy goals are being achieved through these support programs alone is necessary, so it is conducting the study. HIRA said that developing standardized evaluation indicators is necessary to assess the quality of medical cooperation between medical institutions, demonstrate the cooperation system's effectiveness, and set policy directions.

The study aims to develop an index that can empirically analyze and evaluate the effect of the restructuring support project for high-level general hospitals and hospitals on the healthcare delivery system and the quality performance of medical cooperation centered on patient experience. Through these findings, the institute suggests future policy directions and complementary tasks.

The study's main contents include analyzing the policy status of the restructuring support project at the advanced general hospital and hospital levels, analyzing the restructuring support project's impact on the healthcare delivery system and developing indicators, developing indicators to evaluate the quality of the healthcare cooperation system, and establishing a model of healthcare cooperation outcome indicators.

Based on the results, the researcher must also make policy recommendations to improve the healthcare delivery system, including healthcare users and the public.

HIRA plans to use the results as a performance evaluation for the participating organizations and as a policy basis for improving the effectiveness of the support project for restructuring high-level general hospitals and hospitals and strengthening cooperation with local medical institutions.

The research period is five months from the date of contract signing, and the research budget is set at 70 million won ($51,000).