• Health Policy and Management
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.246-255
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• 2016

The study of public health systems is an important, but very difficult task. The concept and functions of public health systems are influenced by the views, interests, and influence of the various stakeholders belonging to public health systems and broader social, economic, political, and environmental sectors. To define public health system with conceptual clarification, we must take into account the dynamic and complex aspect of the public health system. This paper reviews health systems and public health systems literature to suggest the concept, goals, and functions of public health systems. In addition, this paper recognizes some challenges, such as leadership and management, resource development, economic support, and service delivery to strengthen public health systems for improving health and well-being of population.

• Korean Medical Education Review
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.229-242
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• 2023

Health systems science is a new medical educational field added to the traditional medical education curricula of basic and clinical sciences. Health systems science emphasizes a more comprehensive approach utilizing systems thinking to care for patients, including interactions between multiple healthcare systems. In this review, I explore how health systems science education can be applied when medical instructors teach students in clinical clerkships through representative case studies. This study first looks at examples of health systems science education in clinical clerkship in the United States and suggests how to develop the curriculum of health systems science for clinical learning environments in Korea by combining Kotter's 8-step change management model and Kern's 6-step curriculum development model. Finally, based on practical examples from actual clinical practice education situations, suggestions are made regarding how to develop the entire educational program of a medical school from the stage of applying health systems science at the individual level to clinical practice education.

• IE interfaces
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.177-185
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• 2007

e-Business in healthcare sector has been called e-Health, which is evolving into u-Health with advances of ubiquitous technologies. Seamless information sharing among health organizations is being discussed in many nations including USA, UK, Australia and Korea. Efforts for establishing the electronic health record (EHR) system and a nation-wide information sharing environment are called NHII (National Health Information Infrastructure) initiatives. With the advent of u-Health and progress of health information systems, information security issues in healthcare sector have become a very significant problem. In this paper, we analyze several issues on health information security occurring in u-Health environment and develop an information security standard for protecting health information. It is expected that the standard proposed in this work could be established as a national standard after sufficient reviews by information security experts, stakeholders in healthcare sector, and health professionals. Health organizations can establish comprehensive information security systems and protect health information more effectively using the standard. The result of this paper also contributes to relieving worries about privacy and security of individually identifiable health information brought by NHII implementation and u-Health systems.

• Korean Journal of Occupational Health Nursing
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.41-54
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• 2001

This study was designed to assess the relationship between occupational stress and health status in a study group of 197 workers employed in four newspaper publishing companies, using a self-adminstrative questionnaire. The types of occupation of them were reporters(79), clerical workers(54), and engineers (64). The studies on workers' health have been focused mainly on the physical, chemical, and biological diseases in our country. Therefore, the study of mental health, especially of occupational stress, is to be carried out. I consider stress as a factor having an effect on the health status of the newspaper employees, who have been well known to have high stress due to time pressures. I expect that this research will be helpful not only for understanding of health status by occupation, but also for making clear the issues that have been raised continuously from the previous researches. The results of this study are as follows; 1. The mean values of stress by occupation were statistically significant; the reporters had the highest stress symptom scores, and the engineers had the lowest levels of stress. The mean values of stress symptoms were higher in the workers who had long working hours. 2. The health status by occupation showed significant differences in gastrointestinal systems and in depression. The clerical workers were healthier than the engineers in gastrointestinal systems, and the reporters were more depressed than the engineers in depression. 3. The health status by the general characteristics, there was a statistical significance as for a gender, marital status, and absenteeism in the gastrointestinal systems. The men, the married, and the workers who had not been absent were more healthy. Only absenteeism had an effect on the problems in optical-dermal systems and in oro-fecal systems. Gender, marital status, absenteeism, and working hours were related with health status : the men. the married, the workers who had not been absent, and the workers who had longer working hours were more healthy. In mental stability, gender had a significant effect : the men were more healthy than the women. In general condition, the men, the older, the married, and the workers who had not been absent were more healthy. 4. Stress level had an effect on the health status in the respiratory systems, optical-dermal systems, oro-fecal system, depression, mental stability, general condition, and health condition. The workers who perceived more stress had more problems in their health status. 5. In the results of the multiple regression analyses, age in the respiratory systems, absenteeism in the optical-dermal systems, occupation and absenteeism in the gastrointestinal systems and in the oro-fecal systems, gender in depression and in mental stability, gender, age, absenteeism, and working hours in the general condition, absenteeism in the health condition had an effect on the health status of the workers.

• International Journal of Safety
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.32-37
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• 2005

This study was conducted to identity the characteristics of occupational health and safety management systems around the world, to survey the implementation of OHSMS in Korean companies, to find problems and corrective measures, and to understand the opinions of top management about OHSMS. Questionnaires on the operation of occupational health and safety management systems in Korean manufacturing companies were carried out. Occupational health and safety management systems around the world, including OHSAS 18001, BS8800, KOSHA 18001, VPP, J-OHSMS, were reviewed. In order to implement an occupational health and safety management system successfully, it was found that the management should consider occupational health and safety as important, provide employees with necessary training, and have a strong commitment to occupational health and safety.

• Safety and Health at Work
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.159-173
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• 2015

The hand coordinate systems for measuring vibration exposures and biodynamic responses have been standardized, but they are not actually used in many studies. This contradicts the purpose of the standardization. The objectives of this study were to identify the major sources of this problem, and to help define or identify better coordinate systems for the standardization. This study systematically reviewed the principles and definition methods, and evaluated typical hand coordinate systems. This study confirms that, as accelerometers remain the major technology for vibration measurement, it is reasonable to standardize two types of coordinate systems: a tool-based basicentric (BC) system and an anatomically based biodynamic (BD) system. However, these coordinate systems are not well defined in the current standard. Definition of the standard BC system is confusing, and it can be interpreted differently; as a result, it has been inconsistently applied in various standards and studies. The standard hand BD system is defined using the orientation of the third metacarpal bone. It is neither convenient nor defined based on important biological or biodynamic features. This explains why it is rarely used in practice. To resolve these inconsistencies and deficiencies, we proposed a revised method for defining the realistic handle BC system and an alternative method for defining the hand BD system. A fingertip-based BD system for measuring the principal grip force is also proposed based on an important feature of the grip force confirmed in this study.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.273-280
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• 2012

As changed the clinical environment, the interest on u-Healthcare service and systems has been increased. The ubiquitous healthcare(u-Healthcare) systems are constructed at the integrated environment that consists of various devices and systems basically such as personal health devices(PHDs) measuring body signals, information aggregators gathering the data transmitted from PHDs through wireless technology, and health information systems storing and managing personal health information transmitted from the information aggregators. International standards such as IEEE 11073 and HL7 have been specified for the interoperability of PHDs and health information systems, but the research on u-Healthcare systems that were developed and applied in the real clinical environment by adopting the standards was rarely conducted. Therefore, we developed an u-Healthcare system which can manage personal health information, such as blood glucose, blood pressure, and body composition, based on health information exchange standards. Moreover, we verified the stability of the developed system through clinical trial in patients with endocrine disease at the Kyungpook National University Hospital, and listed problems occurred during clinical trial and found their solutions.

• Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.515-522
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• 2023

Objectives: The pandemic caused by coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has exerted an unprecedented impact on the health of populations worldwide. However, the adverse health consequences of the pandemic in terms of infection and mortality rates have varied across countries. In this study, we investigate whether COVID-19 mortality rates across a group of developed nations are associated with characteristics of their healthcare systems, beyond the differential policy responses in those countries. Methods: To achieve the study objective, we distinguished healthcare systems based on the extent of healthcare decommodification. Using available daily data from 2020, 2021, and 2022, we applied quantile regression with non-additive fixed effects to estimate mortality rates across quantiles. Our analysis began prior to vaccine development (in 2020) and continued after the vaccines were introduced (throughout 2021 and part of 2022). Results: The findings indicate that higher testing rates, coupled with more stringent containment and public health measures, had a significant negative impact on the death rate in both pre-vaccination and post-vaccination models. The data from the post-vaccination model demonstrate that higher vaccination rates were associated with significant decreases in fatalities. Additionally, our research indicates that countries with healthcare systems characterized by high and medium levels of decommodification experienced lower mortality rates than those with healthcare systems involving low decommodification. Conclusions: The results of this study indicate that stronger public health infrastructure and more inclusive social protections have mitigated the severity of the pandemic's adverse health impacts, more so than emergency containment measures and social restrictions.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.14 no.12
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• pp.7757-7759
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• 2013

Physicians, in order to study the causes of cancer, detect cancer earlier, prevent or determine the effectiveness of treatment, and specify the reasons for the treatment ineffectiveness, need to access accurate, comprehensive, and timely cancer data. The cancer care environment has become more complex because of the need for coordination and communication among health care professionals with different skills in a variety of roles and the existence of large amounts of data with various formats. The goals of health care systems in such a complex environment are correct health data management, providing appropriate information needs of users to enhance the integrity and quality of health care, timely access to accurate information and reducing medical errors. These roles in new systems with use of agents efficiently perform well. Because of the potential capability of agent systems to solve complex and dynamic health problems, health care system, in order to gain full advantage of E- health, steps must be taken to make use of this technology. Multi-agent systems have effective roles in health service quality improvement especially in telemedicine, emergency situations and management of chronic diseases such as cancer. In the design and implementation of agent based systems, planning items such as information confidentiality and privacy, architecture, communication standards, ethical and legal aspects, identification opportunities and barriers should be considered. It should be noted that usage of agent systems only with a technical view is associated with many problems such as lack of user acceptance. The aim of this commentary is to survey applications, opportunities and barriers of this new artificial intelligence tool for cancer care information as an approach to improve cancer care management.

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.1-28
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• 1996

The paper analyzes OECD health systems from the perspective of historical institutionalism. Criticizing the dependence of Korea's national health program on Pacific countries such as Japan and the U.S., it suggests that European experiences of national health programs can be a model of the Korean health system in the future. Based on an inquiry into Italian and British cases of national health systems, the author emphasizes (1) the role of local governemts in national health programs, and (2) the integration of a national health program with public health programs.