Table 2.

Impact of demographic information on rare disease awareness and perspectives

Rare disease awareness	No factors with statistical significance
Does your hospital pay enough attention to rare disease patients?	Career length (AIC = 289.4388, p = 0.0009
	The longer their career length was, the more likely physicians had a positive response
How many rare disease patients have you met?	Gender (AIC = 491.425, p = 0.02)
	Compared to ‘ > 10’, female physicians were more likely to respond ‘none’
Do you support special legislation for rare diseases?	No factors with statistical significance
Do you support special legislation of orphan drugs?	No factors with statistical significance
Perspectives on medical insurance	No factors with statistical significance
Availability of orphan drugs	No factors with statistical significance
Do you need rare disease information?	No factors with statistical significance
Affordability of orphan drugs	Hospital (AIC = 570.3079, p = 0.017)
	Physicians from Tertiary A hospitals were more likely to rate the affordability of orphan drugs high
Perspectives on newborn screening (AIC = 442.2492, p < 0.05)	Gender (AIC = 442.2492, p < 0.05)
	Female physicians were less likely to believe newborn screening to be important
Does your previous education and training provide sufficient information about rare diseases?	Career length (AIC = 612.4972, p < 0.05)
	The longer the career length was, the less likely they believe previous education to be useful
Do you only want information about rare diseases that can be possibly cured?	Career length (AIC = 290.00995, p < 0.01)
	Physicians with less than 5 years or over 30 years of experience were more likely to respond positively, while physicians with 5–30 years of experience had no preference

First, in Q4, hospitals were initially categorized into 9, and 72.8% of physicians were in the Tertiary A hospitals. Therefore, hospitals were re-categorized into Tertiary A and non-Tertiary A hospitals to ensure that each category has sufficient samples. Then, age and career length were correlated (R² = 0.79). To avoid collinearity, only gender, hospital, and career length were analyzed as independent variables. Rare disease awareness and perspectives (listed in column 1) were analyzed as dependent variables. Then, a MLR analysis was performed with R. Akaike information criterion, AIC