Venue: The Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, 1 Towerview Drive, Durham, NC 27708-0120

 

Presentation

Variation of Health Literacy and Patient Health Behavior in Japan: Different Diagnoses and Treatments

Authors:

Presenter: Masakazu Furukawa (Kyoto University)

Discussant: Randall P. Ellis (Boston University)

Session: Lessons from the Japanese National Healthcare Program: Trend, Development, and Future

Room: Classroom C

When: Monday 5:15 p.m. - 6:45 p.m.

The anxiety about the future increase in health expenditure has risen along with the rapid progress of aging society in Japan. This brings the importance of health education provided to the patient as one of the measures, as pointed out by many researchers so far. The reason is that the increase in health knowledge provided by health education is expected to lead to early detection and prevention of the disease. However, this protective efficacy does not necessarily apply to all kinds of diseases. Some kinds of diseases may not be possibly prevented by man's effort

In this paper, we firstly analyzed the variation, if any, of the impact of health knowledge on the consultation behavior of different diseases at different diagnosis and treatment unit. Second, we looked at the causes of this variation. We used micro data on the level of health knowledge each patient possess, their disease's kind, their medical expense, their motivation for the consultation, and the scale difference of medical institution in with they receive the consultation.

This study would find the kind of disease to which health education is applied most efficiently from the economic view point, and the result gives important policy implication for the reduction of health expenditure.