History of reimbursement system for routine histopathology services by the National Health Insurance in Korea

In January 2009, a new classification of pathology services was been launched for the reimbursement by the National Health Insurance system in Korea. Five basic types of surgical pathology services are reclassified into 13 types and their resource based relative value scores are adjusted. In this report, we summarize the history of the classification system for the reimbursement on pathology services and report the impact of the change in January 2009 on the distribution of cases and contribution on the income of the department of pathology from each class at the Seoul National University Hospital.