Objective:
To understand the
drug purchase
behaviors and
prescription flows of
outpatients and their influencing factors.
Methods:
After selecting and investigating
tertiary hospitals,
secondary hospitals, community health service centers ( one per each level) in
Beijing, Zhengzhou, Guangzhou, this
paper uses structured question-naire
method to analyze 3,155 valid
questionnaires. A
logistic regression analysis is performed to understand the fac-tors influencing the
drug purchase
behaviors.
Results:
The factors influencing the
drug purchase
behaviors of outpa-tients mainly include the region where the
patient is, level of the
hospital, type of
health insurance that the
patient has, frequency of
drug purchase, etc.
Conclusions:
This
paper suggests
hospital administrators to take
measures to improve
prescription flows, such as reforming the
health care insurance to make payment system more suitable for
pharmacies standardizing
supply channels in order to make varieties consistent between
hospitals and
pharmacies, strengthening
education and publicity to raise the
outpatients’
awareness for
drug purchase outside of
hospitals, etc.