2023-07-24 03:50:00
A digital treatment device that treats diseases such as insomnia with software, such as a smartphone app, will open the way to be registered as a benefit of the National Health Insurance Corporation. /Provided by Korea Safety and Health Agency
Digital treatment (DTx), which treats insomnia or depressive disorder using an application installed on a smartphone, will soon be covered by health insurance.
According to the digital healthcare industry on the 21st, the ‘Digital Treatment (DTx) Health Insurance Application Guideline Enactment’ passed the Health Insurance Policy Deliberation Committee subcommittee held on the 19th. It’s been a month since it failed at the so-called last month, and it’s been 5 months since the country’s first digital treatment received domestic product approval in February.
Digital therapy is a method of treating disease by using software rather than pills, injections, or electrical stimulation (electronic medicine). Two domestic software products that treat insomnia, such as ‘Soames (Aimmed)’ and ‘Welt-I (Welt)’, have been approved as domestic items this year, but have yet to cross the threshold of health insurance.
Soames is a software that has a therapeutic effect by correcting habits or behaviors that cause insomnia. After installing the app on a smartphone, if the patient follows the 6-step program provided by the app for 6 to 9 weeks, habits that aggravate insomnia can be improved. Since these digital medicines are made available to patients according to doctors’ prescriptions, their marketability is close to zero unless they are registered with health insurance.
Welt’s insomnia digital treatment device ‘FollowRx’ running. /provided by welt
As the agenda passed the so-called, it is expected that a domestic digital treatment that will be covered by the health insurance will be released as early as next month. The guidelines that passed the so-called this time incorporated digital therapeutics into the health insurance benefit system in the form of ‘temporary listing’ and allowed companies to choose between non-reimbursement and selective benefit (10%). In the selective benefit, the patient pays 90% of the cost and the health insurance pays the remaining 10%.
It seems that there are many places in the digital therapy industry that choose selective benefits. Receiving a ‘salary’ means that it has been recognized by the health insurance, and the burden of the patient can be reduced as much. However, hospitals and clinics that prescribe it may prefer non-reimbursement.
Fees are divided into prescription fees paid to doctors who prescribe digital treatments and usage fees paid to companies, and the prescription fee is likely to be determined in the 10,000 won range. The user fee paid to the company is expected to be set in consideration of manufacturing cost and development cost.
Jung Young-ae, head of the Benefit Registration Office at the Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service, said, “To determine the salary, we need to figure out how much domestic patients can pay for digital treatments.”
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