Proportion of primary care practices using electronic medical records, 2021: 77%
Source: OECD (2023), Health at a Glance 2023: OECD Indicators, OECD Publishing, Paris, doi.org/10.1787/7a7afb35-en.
“As the central agencies for processing the billed services for the insured population of the Republic of Korea, NHIS/HIRA [National Health Insurance Service / Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service] have extensive data on examinations, treatments, prescribed drugs, procedures and diagnoses of approximately 50 million people, in addition to their sociodemographic characteristics and information on the service providers involved. The HIRA data can be linked to other databases, so that missing information (findings, causes of death, disease severity, etc.) can be added. The HIRA data were only released for research purposes in 2009; since then, their use has increased, so that Republic of Korea is among the countries with the highest OECD index (see Table 1.1). Possible areas for research based on HIRA data include adherence, prescription patterns, benefit utilization, burden of disease, adverse events and policy evaluation. Although HIRA data include an “anamnesis” of outpatient and inpatient care of the insured from birth (see Chapter 3), only data from the last five years are released for research purposes.”
Source: Panteli D, Polin K, Webb E, Allin S, Barnes A, Degelsegger-Márquez A, Ghafur S, Jamieson M, Kim Y, Litvinova Y, Nimptsch U, Parkkinen M, Rasmussen TA, Reichebner C, Röttger J, Rumball-Smith J, Scarpetti G, Seidler AL, Seppänen J, Smith M, Snell M, Stanimirovic D, Verheij R, Zaletel M, Busse R. Health and Care Data: Approaches to data linkage for evidence-informed policy. Health Systems in Transition, 2023; 25(2): pp. i–213.
“In the Republic of Korea all accounting data for over 50 million insured persons flow into the database of the national insurance agency (see Chapter 2). These data are generated in the course of reimbursing service providers: invoices are transmitted electronically from service providers to HIRA [Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service], where they are checked. The settlement data of reimbursed claims are stored in the “Data Warehouse” for five years. Access for research purposes was established in 2009. As of December 2019, research projects can request data from the previous five years, although an extension to ten is planned. Identification numbers of insured persons and service providers are stored in encrypted form to protect personal information. Since HIRA data are limited to billing data (i.e., healthcare data), individual research projects so far have had to use and link other datasets (e.g., the national health surveys with health data) to answer broader questions. For example, linkage has been done using regional variables or based on several variables that were present in both datasets (e.g., date of birth, gender, etc.) (see examples in Table 4.1). Microdata are available to researchers in universities and government agencies, and to a limited extent to interested parties from industry and the private sector, including private insurance companies (see Chapter 5). This data accessibility to for-profit insurers and other commercial purposes is not without controversy (see e.g., Song, 2017).”
Source: Panteli D, Polin K, Webb E, Allin S, Barnes A, Degelsegger-Márquez A, Ghafur S, Jamieson M, Kim Y, Litvinova Y, Nimptsch U, Parkkinen M, Rasmussen TA, Reichebner C, Röttger J, Rumball-Smith J, Scarpetti G, Seidler AL, Seppänen J, Smith M, Snell M, Stanimirovic D, Verheij R, Zaletel M, Busse R. Health and Care Data: Approaches to data linkage for evidence-informed policy. Health Systems in Transition, 2023; 25(2): pp. i–213.
“Republic of Korea: The Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA) of 2011 in principle prohibits the collection, use and disclosure of personal data without prior informed consent of the individual whose data are involved. However, after the 2015 MERS outbreak, the changes in the Contagious Disease Prevention and Control Act (CDPCA) provisions and of PIPA and other privacy laws were superseded. The current version of CDPCA allows public agencies to collect, manage and share individual data that associate with confirmed or suspected disease cases. Location data, closed circuit television (CCTV) footage, mobile phone data, personal identification information and medical records are circulated among agencies and need to be linked with national health insurance information systems. The collection of personal and location information by the COVID-19 Smart Management System is compliant with Article 76-2 of the Infectious Disease Control and Prevention Act. Access to the personal information is strictly managed and granted to the authorized KCDC and local government health officials responsible for contact tracing (Park, Choi & Ko, 2020; Lee & Lee, 2020; Asia Pacific Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, 2020).”
Source: Panteli D, Polin K, Webb E, Allin S, Barnes A, Degelsegger-Márquez A, Ghafur S, Jamieson M, Kim Y, Litvinova Y, Nimptsch U, Parkkinen M, Rasmussen TA, Reichebner C, Röttger J, Rumball-Smith J, Scarpetti G, Seidler AL, Seppänen J, Smith M, Snell M, Stanimirovic D, Verheij R, Zaletel M, Busse R. Health and Care Data: Approaches to data linkage for evidence-informed policy. Health Systems in Transition, 2023; 25(2): pp. i–213.
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Page last updated August 7, 2025 by Doug McVay, Editor.