Abstract

Background; Health systems science (HSS) is an emerging framework to specifically identify and to encompass factors which are essential to perform as ideal primary health care providers besides clinical knowledge or skills. This study aims to explore the possibility of implementing the HSS in Korean medicine education. Methods; Literature reviews and experts’ discussion were conducted. The literature reviews included basic principles and related researches on HSS, and classic texts in Korean medicine to investigate how the contents are related and how HSS framework can be adapted. Experts in medical education, Korean internal medicine, and Korean medical classics discussed considering the core concept, current curriculum and real clinical field. Results; Current curriculum includes parts of the core functional domains, specifically patient-centered clinical practice (patients’ concerns, expectation, thought, situation, and individual constitution), policy and economics and population and preventive Korean medicine. Some parts are educated but not sufficient or hidden, such as healthcare process, clinical informatics and health technology, value in health care and system improvement. Discussion and conclusion; HSS may help students to widen their view and to understand the big pictures of the overall contents. Further studies are needed to compare the current curriculum, especially in terms of medical humanities and social medicine, with the contents of HSS. In addition, larger-scale investigation and discussion is need to assess whether the current framework, named medical humanities, needs to be converted into HSS or not.