South Korean Older Adult Mortality Risk by Discharge Destination, 2017-2021

Sunyoung Kim's study analyzes nationwide claims data from the South Korean National Health Insurance Service for 1,115,556 individuals aged 65+ discharged from acute care in 2017. The dataset, last updated in March 2026, tracks mortality outcomes over 4 years, examining the influence of discharge destination, frailty, geriatric syndromes, and comorbidities.

Use Cases

• Modeling mortality risk based on discharge destination categories like home, tertiary/general hospitals, and long-term care hospitals.
• Analyzing the impact of frailty severity and geriatric syndrome count on post-hospitalization survival.
• Investigating the association between comorbidity burden, measured by the Charlson Comorbidity Index, and long-term mortality.
• Comparing patient characteristics, such as age and disability prevalence, across different discharge settings.

Strengths

• Large cohort of 1,115,556 participants with a mean age of 75.5 years.
• Nationwide scope using South Korean National Health Insurance Service claims data.
• Longitudinal follow-up for mortality outcomes over a 4-year period.
• Analysis includes specific hazard ratios (aHR) for mortality by discharge destination.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic and temporal bias inherent to a single country and year.

Provenance

Source

South Korean National Health Insurance Service claims data.

Collection Method

Retrospective analysis of nationwide claims data using multivariable Cox proportional hazards models.

Time Range

Index hospitalization in 2017, with mortality follow-up over 4 years.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-18 07:45:36; freshness should be verified.

Geography

South Korea.