Document Type : Original Article
Authors
1
Assistant Professor, Research Center for Modeling in Health, Institute of Futures Studiesin Health, Kerman University of Medical Sciences, Kerman, Iran
2
Associate Professor, Institute for Trade Studies and Research, Tehran, Iran
3
Associate Professor, National Institute of Health Research, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
4
Assistant Professor, Research Center for Health Services Management, Institute of Futures Studies in Health, Kerman University of Medical Sciences, Kerman, Iran
5
Assistanat Professor, Departments of Health Economics, School of Health Management and Information Sciences, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
Background: Awareness toward peoples’ utilization of health care facilities is a very important issue in the programming and resource allocation process. With implementation of family physician project in Iran and attempts for reforming health referral system, patients’ mobility between regions and its related factors have found more importance. Methods: In this research by using the logit economic model and through retrospective design, the relationship of patient migration with patients’ demographic features, type of health insurance, distance from the health care center and hospitals’ features was determined in 21 disease groups, based on the final diagnosis recorded in patients’ medical files and ICD10 codes. Eviews 6 software was used for all estimations. Results: About 40 percent of inpatients in Kerman hospitals had migrated from other cities where the same services had been available, but the patients were not satisfied of the quality of them. Negative effects of geographical distance, physician and hospital bed count and the positive effect of insurances were constant in all groups, showing similar effects of these variables on patient migration in all disease groups. Conclusion: Results show that factors like distance and kind of disease have no more effect on patient migration than patient perception of the health care center; and ignoring this item, especially in planning the referral system in the big project of family physician, can result in problems in relation to patient equity, patient satisfaction and health organizations’ financial support.
Keywords
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