While the number of traumatic brain injury patients has decreased over the past 10 years, the size of medical expenses has been steadily increasing.
Professor Oh Byeong-mo and Professor Kim Han-gyeol of the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at Seoul National University Hospital analyzed data on health insurance and auto insurance from 2008 to 2018 and published a study titled ‘Traumatic Brain Injury Occurrence and Trends in Medical Service Use in Korea’.
Traumatic brain injury is brain damage caused by external physical force, and the main causes are traffic accidents, falls, sports injuries, industrial accidents, and violence. Mildly, it can cause headaches, dizziness and nausea, to permanent disability with nerve cell damage.
Although there are differences depending on the area and degree of damage, it adversely affects physical functions such as balance, motor ability, and endurance, cognitive functions such as language, communication, and memory, and mental functions such as personality changes.
According to the research results, in the past 10 years, about 4.8 million traumatic brain injury patients newly registered for health insurance and auto insurance in Korea, the number of patients decreased from 488,491 in 2008 to 438,726 in 2017.
However, the cost of treatment has steadily increased. In particular, the total medical expenses due to traumatic brain injury in health insurance increased by 50% from about 210 billion won in 2014 to 320 billion won in 2017. In the case of auto insurance, it increased only about 6% from 230 billion won to 250 billion won during the same period.
By injury, patients with intracerebral hemorrhage spent the most on medical expenses, followed by concussion and skull fracture.
In the case of health insurance, traumatic brain injury mainly occurred in the group of children under the age of 10 and the elderly group over 60 in the case of health insurance. was found to have occurred with
Professor Oh said, “In this study, we were able to confirm the difference in the occurrence of traumatic brain injury and medical expenses between health insurance and automobile insurance. related to it,” he said.
“We plan to observe changes from a macroscopic perspective through continuous research in the future and prepare a policy basis for this,” he said.
Meanwhile, the results of this study were published in the latest issue of ‘Brain & NeuroRehabilitation’.