• Health Policy and Management
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.23-43
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• 2011

Access to health care is complicated to define. It is a multidimensional process. In addition to the matters of quality of care, geographical accessibility and availability of the right type of care, finance, and acceptability are all involved. The purposes of this paper are to measure the geographic distances between patient residency locations and health service organizations in which the patients hadvisited, and to investigate the association between geographical distance measures and variables involved in health service utilization. The study used the first and the second wave of the 2008 Korea Health Panel Survey. The samples of analyses were patients who had visited outpatient or used ambulatory health services, and the total observations (visit numbers) analyzed were 229,128. We divided the samples into a frequent-visit illness group (Group 1) and a non-frequent visit illness group (Group 2) based on over 5,000 total visit numbers. We exploited three level analyses using xtmixed of STATA${\Box}$ 11.1 command with/without interaction terms among age, sex, and occupation. Geographical distances were measured using the Haversine method. Group 1 was tended to older and lower equivalent income than those of Group 2, but the geographic difference were not observed in terms of area deprivation index and standard mortality ratios. Amongst group 1, diabetes mellitus patients travelled far to visit health care organizations, and arthritis patients were more deprived in terms of the personal and areal characteristics. The study revealed that residents in rural areas traveled about 10 times more long distances than those whom lived in larger cities after adjusting for various variables, which we used for analyses. This study contributed to the practical understanding of health service utilizations using empirical analyses, and found that the types of diseases and socioeconomic characteristics of patients tended to define the amount of travel distance to healthcare organizations.

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.27 no.4
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• pp.315-323
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• 2017

Background: This study was purposed to analyze the effect of spatial accessibility to the psychiatry department in general hospital on the outpatient visit of mental patients. Methods: Data was provided from the Statistics Korea and Statistical Geographic Information Service, National Health Insurance Service, Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service, and Korea Transport Institute in 2015. The study regions were 103 administrative regions such as Si and Gu. The 103 regions had at least one general hospitals with a psychiatry department. The number of outpatient visit of mental patients in regions was used as the dependent variable. Spatial accessibility to mental general hospital was used as the independent variable. Control variables included such as demographic, economic, and health medical factors. This study used network analysis and multi-variate regression analysis. Network analysis by ArcGIS ver. 10.0 (ESRI, Redlands, CA, USA) was used to evaluate the average travel time and travel distance in Korea. Multi-variate regression analysis was conducted by SAS ver. 9.4 (SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC, USA). Results: Travel distance and time had significant effects on the number of outpatient visits in mental patients in general hospital. Average travel time and travel distance had negative effects on the number of visits. Variables such as (number of total population, percentage of aged population over 65, and number of mental general hospital) had significant effects on the number of visit in mental patients. Conclusion: Health policy makers will need to consider the spatial accessibility to the mental healthcare organization in conducting regional health planning.

• Journal of People, Plants, and Environment
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.677-690
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• 2019

Recently, the importance and effectiveness of neighborhood forests have been increasing in relation to the quality of life of urban residents. However, there are very few domestic studies that analyzed the correlation between visit characteristics and life satisfaction. Therefore, the study aims to understand how people use the forest for recreation and determine how visit characteristics in neighborhood forests affect individual life satisfaction(ILS). A nationwide survey (N=2,624) was conducted on visit frequency, proximity to forest, means of transportation, forest activities, and life satisfaction. To measure ILS, we used the three factors (personal, relative, collective) of COMOSWB (Concise Measure of Subjective Well-being) developed by Seo et al.(2011). The analysis shows that people usually visit the forest located within the distance of 10-30 minutes from their homes 1-2 times a month on foot for hiking/walking (forest bathing). In particular, the older visitors(over 60s) tend to visit the forest more often than the younger ones (20s). Furthermore, more frequent visitors are more likely to live near the forest. As a result of analyzing the correlation between visit characteristics and ILS by controlling demographic variables, it was found that 'visit frequency' had a positive effect on ILS, and 'proximity to the forest' did not have a statistically significant effect on ILS. In other words, residents who live near the forests are more likely to be satisfied with their lives by visiting frequently. The significance of the study is that it statistically determined that visit frequency is a key factor for ILS. Future studies should take into account the various qualitative factors of forest visit such as vegetation, quantity and types of forest, which will contribute to setting the direction for urban forest development and management.

• Proceedings of the KSRS Conference
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• 2004.10a
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• pp.260-262
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• 2004

Spatial database system provides many query types and most of them are required frequent disk I/O and much CPU time. k-NN search is to find k-th closest object from the query point and up to now, several k-NN search methods have been proposed. Among these, MINMAX distance method has an aim not to visit unnecessary node by applying pruning technique. But this method access more disk than necessary while pruning unnecessary node. In this paper, we propose new k-NN search algorithm based on density of object. With this method, we predict the radius to be expected to contain k-NN object using density of data set and search those objects within this radius and then adjust radius if failed. Experimental results show that this method outperforms the previous MINMAX distance method. This algorithm visit fewer disks than MINMAX method by the factor of maximum $22\%\;and\;average\;6\%.$

• Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.99-106
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• 1979

Accessibility to medical facilities and personnels has been known as one of important determinants of medical care utilization. This study attempted to identify the effects of medical accessibility in terms of geographical distance and occupational opportunity to the medical utilizations. Two-year-experiences of Yonsei University Health Insurance Cooperatives were used as the sources of data. Out patient utilization patterns of 713 members sampled from 4,352 members of Health Insurance Cooperatives were analyzed in order to identify the effects of medical accessibilities. Findings: 1 Average clinic visit rate of Yonsei Health Insurance is 1.66 per person per year. 2. The utilization rates of geographically more accessible group were 33% higher than that of less accessible group. 3. No marked difference in clinic visit rate were observed between medical and non-medical personnel and their family members. 4. Clinic visit rates among occupationally accessible group were slightly higher than those of less accessible. The utilization rate was more sensitively changed by the insurance policy changes in occupationally accessible group.

• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.169-194
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• 2008

Recently, the concept of web site stickiness receives attention as a measure of strategy to influence user's visit and behavior on web sites. Web site stickiness means site visit frequency and stay duration. This study investigates the moderating effect of espoused national cultural values on Internet community stickiness with the assumption that dimensional values of national culture can be internalized as individual’s espoused values. Espoused values (i.e., espoused national cultural values) are defined as the degree to which an individual embraces the values of his or her national culture. Our findings can be summarized as follows. First, femininity and power distance moderate the influence of user participation on Internet community stickiness. Second, uncertainty avoidance and power distance moderates the effect of social influence on Internet community stickiness. However, femininity and collectivism do not moderate the effect of social influence on Internet community stickiness. Third, uncertainty avoidance, femininity, and collectivism moderate the influence of network effect on Internet community stickiness. Fourth, masculinity does not moderate the influence of usefulness on Internet community stickiness.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Environmental Restoration Technology
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• v.11 no.6
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• pp.91-103
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• 2008

The purpose of this study is to compare the satisfaction of the urban parks and to classify and assess the environmentally-friendly behaviors in the urban parks. For this purpose, the park user's behaviors and satisfactions were surveyed in 10 parks in Seoul and its suburb area. Parks are divided into 2 types, the walking-distance parks and the metropolitan parks, by time to reach, visit frequency and visit purpose. The park users are generally satisfied with the facilities, but not satisfied with some specific items, such as cultural facilities, accommodations for the handicapped, safety facilities and sports facilities. The environmentally-friendly behaviors are positively assessed in general, but the behavior of the natural experience was negatively assessed. The environmentally-friendly behaviors in the urban parks are classified into 2 factors; the experience factor and the activity factor. The parks are categorized into 3 types by these factors. For type I parks, the experience factor is dominant, but the activity factor is relatively low. For type II parks, the both factors are low and the parks are necessary to improve. And type III parks are positively assessed in the aspect of the environmentally-friendly behaviors, even though some park are necessary to complement.

• The Korean Journal of Health Service Management
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.23-31
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• 2010

This study analyzed whether the patients' visits to oriental medicine hospitals were influenced by the Euclidean distance from patients' residence to oriental medicine hospitals. Patient who visited two oriental medicine hospitals in a metropolitan area were selected for study sample. The number of patient from each Dong (which is the smallest administrative district) to two hospitals was calculated based on claims data in 2008. ArcGIS was used to calculate the distance. Distance variable was not statistically significant in regression analysis after controlling the difference of socio-economic status of people in each Dong. It seems that distance factor did not play an important role in deciding whether to use the services of oriental medicine hospitals in a metropolitan area.

• Management Science and Financial Engineering
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.1-14
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• 1997

We address the problem of determining the sequence of a vehicle with fixed capacity to visit n nodes at which a predetermined amount is picked up and/or delivered. The objective is to minimize the total travel distance of the vehicle, while satisfying the pick-up/delivery requirements and feasibility at all nodes. Existing methods for the problem allows the vehicle to visit a node twice, which is impractical in many real situations. We propose a heuristic algorithm, in which every node is visited exactly once. Computational results using random problems indicate that the proposed heuristic outperforms existing methods for practical range of the number of nodes in reasonable computation time.

• Journal of the military operations research society of Korea
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.81-95
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• 2004

This paper presents optimal solutions for the following two problems ; (1) The vehicle routing problem with deadline considering homeward-route transport requirement, (2) The problem of (1) with relaxed constraint that the vehicle cannot visit the depot during the trip. That is, for the second problem, vehicle can visit the depot several times during the trip. The formulation and optimal solution we obtained outperform the existing ones proposed by other researchers in the sense of time and total distance traveled and the results can be applicable to short-haul local transport.