The Effect of Having a Regular Doctor as a Primary Care Provider on Emergency Room Utilization in South Korea

Lee, Su-Young; Lim, Hyeong-Seok

Having a USC has been associated with improved receipt of preventive services (pap smear, clinical breast exam, mammogram, and prostate cancer screening) compared with no USC. [17] [18] [19] [20] Comparison of a regular doctor and having a regular site as USC revealed that a regular doctor was more effective than a regular site for providing blood pressure checks, cholesterol level checkups, and influenza vaccines. 21) Countries with strong primary care may have lower overall health care costs and healthier populations. 22) Strong primary care has been related to adequate primary care physician supply and long-term relationships between primary care physicians and decreased hospitalization for chronic ambulatory care-sensitive conditions. 23) Long-term relationships were also related to substantially lower costs of inpatient and outpatient care. 24) Patients with insufficient USCs, particularly the uninsured and Medicaid enrollees, have a tendency to rely on the ER. 25) And patients who are dissatisfied with their USC or experience access barriers to their USC more likely to have a non-urgent ER visit. 26) Domestic studies also indicate that participants with a USC have higher smoking cessation rates, are more often advised to stop smoking, 27) and show significantly reduced unmet medical needs. 28) The current study has several limitations. 30) There are some limitations to this study. We did not reach the perfect causal inference because of unobserved Heterogeneity and Endogeneity partly. In the overall study population, having a regular doctor resulted in no difference in ER visits. However, there was a decrease in ER visits among patients with DM. For a more complete causal inference, studies that control unobserved Heterogeneity and Endogeneity in the future need to proceed.