| Summary: | 碩士 === 中華科技大學 === 健康科技研究所在職專班 === 103 === Taiwan’s National Health Insurance Administration (NHIA) declares the drug reimbursement guidelines of zolpidem in 2009. We study the impact of policy change to the prescription pattern of zolpidem in Taiwan. We applied the retrospective cohort study method by using panel claims data of National Health Insurance beneficiaries from 2008 to 2011 in Taiwan. The data set consisted of outpatient and inpatient visit, diagnosis, and prescription drug records. The trends of zolpidem’s prescription pattern were evaluated and compared by the variables of gender and age, clinical specialty visiting, hospital levels, and branch bureau of the NHIA. The results of this paper are the prescription amount of zolpidem increased to 138,057,888 tablets annually in 2011 with 5.99% year-over-year rate. Among these patients receiving the zolpidem, the females dominate with increasing rate from 60.8% to 61.7%. The prescription rates of age group between 45 to 65 and older than 65 had increased and the group between 18 to 45 had decreased. The rate of clinical specialty visiting in prescribing zolpidem increased in the psychiatry division and decreased in the internal medicine and family medicine divisions. The prescription rates of hospital levels showed increased in the medical center and regional hospital level, and decreased in the district hospital level and clinics level. The prescription rates decreased in the Taichung branch and increased in the Taipei branch of the NHIA. The conclusion of this paper is the change of drug reimbursement guidelines of zolpidem in 2009 had changed the prescription patterns in Taiwan. We encouraged further researches in the utilization analysis of zolpidem between different age group, gender, geographical areas and comorbidities to monitor the following impact of policy change.
Keywords: zolpidem, the National Health Insurance, drug reimbursement guidelines, prescription pattern
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