Abstract:
The National Health Security Office holds a duty of managing the funds, making
payments to medical service units and allocating the budget for high-cost diseases at the
central office. All claim data records were set to be submitted by the hospitals to the National
Health Security Office. It was found that there were some flaws in connection with out-ofdate,
incomplete and incorrect data. There were transactions concerning claim submission
more than 30 days and which directly affected their revenues. The objectives of this research
were to evaluate the effectiveness of high cost care claim and to find out the relationship
between hospital characteristics and personnel characteristics and the effectiveness of
management process of high cost care claim in Thailands government hospitals.
This study was the cross-sectional descriptive research, conducted in government
hospitals under the universal health insurance scheme. The data were collected from the high
cost care claims for the fiscal year 2005 kept by the National Health Security Office up to
claims on 1 October 2005. The questionnaires were also mailed to the health insurance heads
and officers recording in-patient data record program. The data collection has been done from
1 October to 30 November 2006 and the questionnaires were returned by 255 hospitals. The
relationship between variables was analyzed by the descriptive statistics consisting of
Pearsons Product Moment Correlation Coefficient, Chi-Square and Stepwise Multiple
Regression Analysis.
The results showed that the studied hospitals achieved the high effectiveness of
process management of high cost care claim. The regional hospitals made claims in-time ,
complete and correct, and received the most refund for diseases having the relative weight
more than or equal to 4, chemo-radio therapy, heart surgery and craniotomy. The factors in
respect with hospital characteristics influenced the effectiveness of high cost care claim
significantly at the statistic test level of .05 (p-value <.05). The hospitals with high number of
beds and long duration of data record sending influenced the increase of the effectiveness of
process management of high cost care claim at 38.9%. For the personnel characteristics
factor, it did not influence the effectiveness of high cost care claim. The finding of this study
showed that the high potential hospital in disease treatment has increasing effectiveness of
process management of high cost care claim.
The suggestions of this study were that the criteria of claims should be clearly
explained to the service units and these results should be implemented to revise the process
management of high cost care claim in hospitals for more effectiveness and efficiency