• 한국환경보건학회지
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• 제46권5호
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• pp.599-609
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• 2020

Objectives: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) first emerged in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, and has rapidly become a global pandemic with over 26.4 million confirmed cases and approximately 871,000 fatalities worldwide as of this writing. In the Republic of Korea, disease clusters frequently occurred in long-term care hospitals where the majority of residents are elderly with underlying medical conditions. Despite the fact that public health authorities and local community health centers have put tremendous efforts into preventing the spread of disease, positive cases have continued to occur. Thus, the Korea Centers for Disease Control & Prevention rapid response team decided to conduct an environmental investigation of a long-term care hospital to identify whether environmental contamination has remained and contributed to the spread of COVID-19. Methods: An environmental investigation was conducted at Hospital A. The characteristics of the facility and its HVAC system were assessed by checking the layout and interviewing the people in charge. A total of 64 surface samples were collected from areas of concern, including patient rooms, toilets, elevators, and nurses' station. These samples were tested by a regional health and environmental research institute using real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction. Results: All samples from Hospital A were confirmed to be negative. Through interviews with high-level personnel at the regional community health center, we found that extensive disinfection is frequently performed on potentially contaminated areas in Hospital A in accordance with government guidelines. Conclusion: The environmental control measures implemented in Hospital A had been sufficient for mitigating the risk of further infection, suggesting that such measures may also be effective for other long-term health care facilities.

• Journal of Dental Anesthesia and Pain Medicine
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• 제24권1호
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• pp.67-73
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• 2024

Background: Nitrous oxide has been an integral part of surgical anesthesia for many years in the developed world and is still used in developing countries such as India. The other main concerns in low-resource countries are the lack of an advanced anesthesia gas-scavenging system and modular surgical theatres. As a greenhouse gas that has been present in the atmosphere for more than 100 years and damages the ozone layer, nitrous oxide is three times worse than sevoflurane. Here, we conducted an observational study to quantify the annual nitrous oxide consumption and its environmental impact in terms of carbon dioxide equivalence in one of busiest tertiary health care and research centers in Northern India. Methods: Data related to nitrous oxide expenditure' from the operation theatre and manifold complex of our tertiary care hospital and research center from 2018 to 2021 were collected monthly and analyzed. The outcomes were extracted from our observational study, which was approved by our institutional ethics board (INT/IEC/2017/1372 Dated 25.11.2017) and registered prospectively under the Central Registry (CTRI/2018/07/014745 Dated 05.07.2018). Results: The annual nitrous oxide consumption in our tertiary care hospital was 22,081.00, 22,904.00, 17,456.00, and 18,392.00 m³ (cubic meters) in 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021, respectively. This indicates that the environmental impact of nitrous oxide (in terms of CO₂ equivalents) from our hospital in 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021 was 13,016.64, 13,287.82, 10,289.94, and 10,841.24 tons, respectively. Conclusion: This huge amount of nitrous oxide splurge is no longer a matter of laughter, and serious efforts should be made at every central and peripheral health center level to reduce it.

• Journal of Genetic Medicine
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• 제5권2호
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• pp.89-93
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• 2008

"Personalized medicine," the goal of which is to provide better clinical care by applying patient's own genomic information to their health care is a global challenge for the $21^{st}$ century "genomic era." This is especially true in Korea, where provisions for clinical genetic services are inadequate for the existing demand, let alone future demands. Genomics-based knowledge and tools make it possible to approach each patient as a unique biological individual, which has led to a paradigm-shift in medical practice, giving it more of a predictive focus as compared with current treatment oriented approach. With recent advancements in genomics, many genetic tests, such as susceptibility genetic tests, have been developed for both rare single gene diseases and more common multifactorial diseases. Indeed, genetic tests for presymtomatic individuals and genetic tests for drug response have become widely available, and personalized medicine will face the challenge of assisting patients who use such tests to make appropriate and wise use of genetic risk assessment. A major challenge of genomic medicine lies in understanding and communicating disease risk in order to facilitate and support patients and their families in making informed decisions. Establishment of a health care system with provisions for genetic counseling as an integral part of health care service, in addition to genomic literacy of health care providers, is vital to meet this growing challenge. Realization of the promise of personalized medicine in the era of genomics for improvement of health care is dependent on further development of next generation sequencing technology and affordable sequencing test costs. Also necessary will be policy development concerning the ethical, legal and social issues of genomic medicine and an educated and ready medical community with clinical practice guidelines for genetic counseling and genetic testing.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• 제7권4호
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• pp.155-162
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• 2020

The paper aims to examine the association between information and communication technology (ICT), economic growth and population health based on health production model in Malaysia. This theoretical health production function is represented as follows: where the output is an individual health outcome, and the inputs are determinants of health, such as income, education, health care costs, medical facilities, the environment, and lifestyle. The development of information and communication technologies are represented as of mobile cellular subscriptions (per 100) and fixed telephone subscriptions (100) using time series data from 1993-2017 from the World Bank database. Using the bound testing technique of cointegration, this study finds that ICT affects population health significantly and positively in the long- and short-run. This is because ICT inclusion improves human health and longevity. Whereas, economic growth has no significant impact on the population's health both in the short- and long-run. The findings indicate that a weak global economy affects Malaysia's economic growth and reduces the health expenditure per capita. The results of this study suggest that policymakers must develop policies that improves public health by increasing health literacy, disseminating health information and facilitating medical facilities. This study also suggests that health care systems should to concentrate on digital inclusion.

• 한국식품영양과학회지
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• 제43권2호
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• pp.179-186
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• 2014

대사체학이 질병, 약물, 스트레스, 식이, 생활습관, 유전적 차이, 장내 미생물 등에 의해서 발생하는 비정상적인 대사 메커니즘을 규명하고 관련 바이오 마커 발굴에 중요한 역할이 증명됨에 따라, 식품 영양학과 대사체학이 융합된 영양 대사체학의 역할이 더욱 중요해지고 있다. 특히 잘못된 식생활에 따른 미래의 질병 예측이 가능해지고 있어 향후 적절한 질병 예방이나 치료를 위한 적절한 식생활이나 식이에 대한 정보를 제공함으로써 건강 증진은 물론 개인별 맞춤식이나 맞춤약물 처방을 통한 개인 맞춤형 건강관리(personalized health care) 시대가 멀지 않았다. 또한 복잡한 식생활 패턴, 대사 반응에 대한 개인 간 차이 그리고 방대한 대사체 데이터와의 관계들을 효과적으로 밝혀낼 수 있는 기술에 대한 지속적인 개발과 영양 대사체학(nutritional metabolomics)이 유전체학(genomics or transcriptomics)과 단백체학(proteomics) 기술과 융합적으로 연구가 이루어질 때 질병과 식사 섭취 사이의 관계가 더욱 투명하게 규명될 것이다.

• 한국간호교육학회지
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• 제28권4호
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• pp.400-410
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• 2022

Purpose: This study aimed to understand the keywords and major topics of the educational goals and objectives of nursing educational institutions in South Korea. Methods: From May 10 to May 20, 2022, the educational goals and objectives of all 201 nursing educational institutions in South Korea were collected. Using the NetMiner program, degree and degree centrality, semantic structure, and topic modeling were analyzed. Results: The top keywords and semantic structures of educational goals included 'respect for human (life)-spirit-science-based on, global-competency-professional nurse-nursing personnel-training, professional-science-knowledge-skills, and patients-therapeutic care-relationship.' The educational goals' major topics were clients well-being based on science and respect for human life, a practicing nurse with capabilities and spirit, fostering a nursing personnel with creativity and professionalism, and training of global nurses. The top keywords and semantic structures of the educational objectives included 'holistic care-nursing-research-action-capability, critical thinking-health-problem solving-capability, and efficiency-communication-collaboration-capability.' The educational objectives' major topics were 'nursing professionalism, communication and problem-solving capability; a change of healthcare environments and a progress of nursing practices; fostering professional nurses with creativity and global capability; and clients' health and nursing practice.' Conclusion: Educational goals in nursing presented specific nursing values and concepts, such as respect for human life, therapeutic care relationships, and the promotion of well-being. Educational objectives in nursing presented the competencies of nurses as defined by the Korean Accreditation Board of Nursing Education (KABONE). Recently, the KABONE announced new program outcomes and competencies, which will require the revision of educational goals. To achieve those educational objectives, it is suggested that the expected level of competencies be clearly defined for nursing graduates.

• International journal of advanced smart convergence
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• 제12권4호
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• pp.434-442
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• 2023

The relationship between acute kidney injury (AKI) prediction and nephrotoxic drugs, or drugs that adversely affect kidney function, is one that has yet to be explored in the critical care setting. One contributing factor to this gap in research is the limited investigation of drug modalities in the intensive care unit (ICU) context, due to the challenges of processing prescription data into the corresponding drug representations and a lack in the comprehensive understanding of these drug representations. This study addresses this gap by proposing a novel approach that leverages patient prescription data as a modality to improve existing models for AKI prediction. We base our research on Electronic Health Record (EHR) data, extracting the relevant patient prescription information and converting it into the selected drug representation for our research, the extended-connectivity fingerprint (ECFP). Furthermore, we adopt a unique multimodal approach, developing machine learning models and 1D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) applied to clinical drug representations, establishing a procedure which has not been used by any previous studies predicting AKI. The findings showcase a notable improvement in AKI prediction through the integration of drug embeddings and other patient cohort features. By using drug features represented as ECFP molecular fingerprints along with common cohort features such as demographics and lab test values, we achieved a considerable improvement in model performance for the AKI prediction task over the baseline model which does not include the drug representations as features, indicating that our distinct approach enhances existing baseline techniques and highlights the relevance of drug data in predicting AKI in the ICU setting.

• 대한예방한의학회지
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• 제18권3호
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• pp.91-104
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• 2014

Objective : This study aims to compare the scope of practice of Korean Medicine doctors and western medicine doctors based on laws related to medical practice Method : We searched for laws related to medical practice using terminologies such as "Korean Medical practice", "Korean Medicine", "Principles of Korean Medicine", "western medicine", "Korean Medicine doctor", "western medicine doctor" at the national law information center(http://law.go.kr/main.html). Results : We categorized the laws we found into four categories: diagnosis, treatment, prescription, and all the other areas including public health. In diagnosis, both Korean Medicine doctors and western medicine doctors have a right to issue medical certificates including birth and death. However, diagnosis of a few specific diseases is allowed only to western medicine doctors. In treatment, laws related to emergency medicine and nursing at home were searched. Korean Medicine doctors and western medicine doctors are emergency care providers; however, most of emergency medicine can be done by western medicine doctors. In prescription, the scope of practice is divided by herbal medicine and western medicine. Finally, as public health professionals, both of them need to do lots of public health works. However, in some area such as vaccination, maternal and child health care, and industrial health, only western medicine doctors can practice. Conclusion : This study suggests that, in diagnosis, treatment, prescription, and all the other areas including public health, the scope of practice of Korean Medicine doctors and western medicine doctors has huge difference. There is also lack of consistency in current law, and some laws do not reflect current health care system and health care services.

• Gut and Liver
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• 제12권6호
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• pp.615-622
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• 2018

Despite the well-proven, safe and effective therapies for hepatitis B infection, delivery of treatment remains a significant challenge in resource-poor settings. Geopolitical and economic restrictions present additional difficulties in providing care in North Korea. However, treatment of patients with chronic hepatitis B remains a top priority for both the North Korean Ministry of Public Health and international agencies working in North Korean hepatitis healthcare facilities. Working in partnership, a path was created to institute this much-needed program. A consortium of United States and Australian humanitarian non-governmental organizations along with generous individual and corporate donors working in concert with local and national health authorities have succeeded in establishing the first hepatitis B treatment program in North Korea. The essential elements of this program include renovation of existing hepatitis hospitals, access to antiviral medications, establishment of laboratory facilities, creation of medical documentation and record-keeping, training of local health care professionals, and quarterly visits by international volunteer physicians and laboratory experts. Management and treatment decisions are made bilaterally. To date, nearly 1,500 patients have been evaluated, and over 800 have been started on long-term antiviral therapy. It is envisioned that this program will eventually be managed and funded by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea Ministry of Public Health. This program's success demonstrates a potential model for delivery of antiviral therapy for patients suffering from hepatitis B in other developing countries.

• 보건행정학회지
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• 제30권2호
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• pp.253-262
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• 2020

Background: The public health care system of a country is shaped and driven by its historical background as well as social, economic, and cultural structures. This study sheds light on the unique features, strengths, and weaknesses of the health insurance systems of South Korea (Korea) and Peru. Methods: The capacity mapping tool was used to explore the Korean and Peruvian population and geographical structures; health insurance laws, regulations, and policies; payment systems; eligibility and contribution collection; and long-term care insurance. Results: The study found that the Korean government took the lead in integrating multiple insurers into a single-payer system in an effort to reinforce and stabilize its health insurance system in 2000. Peru has been developed mixed model such based on taxes and contributions, to address a gap between different social classes. Peruvian government developed a two-axis system, one for low-income earners, financed by taxes, and another financed by contributions paid by workers and government officials in the formal sector. Peru has introduced many variations to its fee payment and insurer systems, target population, and coverage scope, and maintains its health insurance system accordingly to this day. Conclusion: The current study provides observation of the Health Insurance System in two different countries and helps to understand possible ways to improve the health insurance system in both countries. Based on this study, Peru will be able to see how its system differs from Korea's and benefit from the related policy implications.