DATA PROFILE Open Access A guide for the utilization of Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service National Patient Samples

The claims data of the Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service (HIRA) is an important source of in-formation for healthcare service research. The claims data of HIRA is collected when healthcare service pro-viders submit a claim to HIRA to be reimbursed for a service that they provided to patients. To improve the accessibility of healthcare service researchers to claims data of HIRA, HIRA has developed the Patient Sam-ples which are extracted using a stratified randomized sampling method. The Patient Samples of HIRA consist of five tables: a table for general information (Table 20) containing socio-demographic information such as gen-der, age and medical aid, indicators for inpatient and outpatient services; a table for specific information on health-care services provided (Table 30); a table for diagnostic information (Table 40); a table for outpatient prescrip-tions (Table 53) and a table for information on healthcare service providers (Table of providers). Researchers who are interested in using the Patient Sample data for research can apply via HIRA’s websit