An Empirical Research for the Jumboizing Strategy of General Hospitals in Korea

Abstract

Objective: To study whether the number of hospital beds is effective or not for the main strategy of the general hospitals of Korea. Many small- and medium-sized hospitals find it difficult to maintain their man-agement and about 10 per cent of the hospitals in the whole country every year give up the management, including quitting of one’s business or the transfer of the right of ownership. However, some university hospitals adopt the hospital strategy in which they jumboize the number of hospital bed. The data consisted of 181 general hospitals with more than 100 beds, which included 28 public hospitals, 73 corporate hospitals, 64 university hospitals and 16 private hospitals. This study used hospitals from the Korean Hospital Association (data of the 181 hospitals enrolled with the Korean Hospital Association) published in 2004, and divided the hospitals into five groups according to the number of hospital beds. This study was to analyze the relation between the number of medi-cal specialists per 100 beds and managerial performance per medical specialist on the each group. Thus, this research was tested using regression analysis, setting up the number of medical specialists per 100 beds as independent variable and the index of hospital managerial per-formance as dependent variable. For the part used as index of hospital managerial performance, medical revenue index is used for total income and growth index is used for the number of outpatients and inpatients. To analyze this study, the statistical program used is SPSS WIN 12.0. The result of analysis is to identify that the big hospitals with greater number of beds and medical specialists have shown greater revenue per medical specialist despite the smaller number of patients per medical specialist. This means that the non-financial measurement called the number of hospital beds influences the hospital revenue which is a fi-nancial, and the big hospitals with greater number of beds is higher pro-fitability on the hospital revenue. Under the current health care medical charge system, this is empiric-ally to certify that jumboizing hospital on the number of hospital beds is the best strategy in order to maintain a stable hospital management and to improve the medical profitability.