• Health Policy and Management
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• v.34 no.3
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• pp.319-333
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• 2024

Background: This study aims to identify the factors that influence the incidence of catastrophic health expenditure (CHE) for the elderly living alone and to discuss how to manage CHE for the elderly living alone. Methods: This study utilizes 6th (2016), 7th (2018), and 8th (2020) data from the Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging to identify the incidence rate of CHE among the elderly living alone and conducts a panel logit analysis. The dependent variable is the incidence of CHE (thresholds: 10%, 20%, 30%), and the independent variables include demographic factors (gender, age group, region), socioeconomic factors (education level, economic activity status, income quintile, financial support rate from children), health-related factors (subjective health status, regular exercise, smoking, drinking, number of chronic diseases), and healthcare coverage factors (type of health insurance, private health insurance). Results: Descriptive statistics classified by gender show that female elderly living alone are more vulnerable than male elderly living alone in terms of disease prevalence and socioeconomic status. In addition, the incidence of CHE is higher for elderly women living alone than for elderly men living alone across all thresholds. The main results of the panel logit analysis show that higher education, income quintile, and financial support rate from children are associated with lower odds of CHE, while poorer subjective health and a higher number of chronic diseases are associated with higher odds of CHE. Medical aid recipients are less likely to incur CHE than those covered by national health insurance. Conclusion: The implications of this study are as follows. First, vulnerable elderly living alone with multiple chronic diseases and low income and education levels are more likely to incur CHE. Second, it is necessary to review policies such as a CHE support program and chronic disease management programs focused on vulnerable elderly individuals living alone. Third, the CHE support program should be operated in a patient-centered manner, with consideration given to a customized system for selecting and supporting elderly individuals living alone who are in need.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.678-684
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• 2012

The purpose of this study is to figure out and establish the basic data that can help improve management of oral healthcare for the international marriage migrantwomen. In this sense, we surveyed questions on 237 women out of 1,300 immigrant women, who have participated the program in operation by multi-cultural household supporting center, in a fashion of face-to-face investigation and on-the-spot direct cavity inspection simultaneously from May 1th to October 31th, 2010. Collected data were electro-statistically computerized under SPSS 17.0 program and analyzed with frequency analysis, recurrence analysis and logistic regression analysis respectively. Foundings were revealed as follows; On the nationality base, show the data in the ratio of 38.8% for Vietnamese, 29.1% for Philippine, 12.2% for Chinese and 6.8% for Japanese respectively. Current oral cavity status shows in the ratio of 60% with carious tooth symptoms, 40% without carious tooth symptom. Philippine women have irregular sets of tooth in many a case. (i.e., in short of numbers of teeth, due to removing individual tooth.) Japanese ladies are indicated to have less irregular sets of tooth, in comparison with that of the other immigrants from overseas. And lastly, high-income immigrant women in general were found having less numbers of unhealthy sets of tooth. Getting older, it appears that decayed tooth symptom is on the tendency of getting less in the field of dentistry circles. Immigrant ladies living with husbands under higher education background usually are found living a life in the less ratio of having toothache. A full-time immigrant housewives, however, are living everyday life in more times of suffering with tooth disease.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.491-500
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• 2014

The purpose of this study was to examine the health status of marriage immigrants and naturalized people, their health service utilization and barriers to that in an effort to seek ways of getting rid of their difficulties in health service utilization. The raw data of a 2012 Survey on the State of Multicultural Families were used, and a survey was conducted on 15,001 marriage immigrants and naturalized people from July 10 to July 31, 2012. As a result, the marriage immigrants and the naturalized people got a mean of 3.96 in subjective health status, which showed that they were in good health. The main medical institutions that they used in times of sickness were hospitals and clinics(82.7%). 39.1 percent of the respondents answered they had difficulties in using health service, and the most dominant difficulty they faced at that time was communication problems(52.0%), followed by high expense(28.9%). The respondents who answered they found it most difficult to use health service due to communication lagged behind the others in terms of Korean proficiency, and the respondents who cited expense as the biggest difficulty fell behind the others in terms of living standard. To make health service more accessible to marriage immigrants and naturalized people, the government should take measures to ensure their right of health. Specifically, how to relieve their financial burden should carefully be devised, and medical institutions should provide interpretation service to guarantee their easier health service utilization.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.445-455
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• 2014

This study has targeted to comparatively analyze smoking cessation success rates and success factors among new enrollees and re-enrollees in Smoking Cessation Clinics for its efficient operation. A total of 319,908 smokers who were enrolled in the Smoking Cessation Clinics in one of 253 public health centers across the nation for more than 6 months from July 16, 2009 to July 15, 2010 were examined. According to the comparative analysis, the following results have been obtained. According to the results, it has been confirmed that it is necessary to determine why smoking cessation success rates are low and take additional efforts to increase the rates for the effective operation of smoking cessation clinics. In addition, smoking cessation success rates were higher when only BT(Behavior Therapy) was given than when both BT and NRT(Nicotine Replacement Therapy) were provided to new enrollees while they were lower when only BT was provided than when both BT and NRT were given to re-enrollees. Therefore, it is necessary to provide differentiated service types depending on the type of enrollment. Hence, it is also required for the government to take various approaches in terms of a direction for a smoking cessation policy.

• Journal of Hospice and Palliative Care
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.35-41
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• 2015

Purpose: This study was conducted to examine how patients' coping style and social support affect post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in breast cancer patients who are treated with chemotherapy. Methods: The sample consisted of 134 outpatients who received breast cancer treatments at the cancer clinic of a university hospital. The collected data were analyzed by frequency, percentage, t-test, ANOVA, ${\chi}^2$-test, Pearson correlation coefficients using SPSS for Windows, version 18.0. Results: Among total, 26.9% of patients were classified into a high-risk PTSD group. In the high-risk group, a positive correlation was found between active and passive coping styles and between social support and active coping styles. Conclusion: In this study, the stronger the social support was, the more active the coping style was for high-risk PTSD patients with breast cancer. Considering the fact that cancer requires life-long self-management, strong social support could improve patients' healthcare capability. Furthermore, solid social support could effectively reduce the stress level and improve the quality of life for breast cancer patients in the high-risk PTSD group.

• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.415-424
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• 2012

According to introduction of Well-Being lifestyle and ageing society, vital sign monitoring system which can be continued measurement of vital sign has been increased their important in field of the healthcare. Under this trend, Respiration monitoring system has been studied and developed in a various way to apply continued monitoring and non-conscious monitoring system. But, Study of the respiration monitoring system based on consumer needs and usability test is insufficient. In this study, Textile capacitive pressure sensor(TCPS) of belt type was developed and tested it's utility and subjective sensibility. TCPS measures respiration signals and can be derived in real time monitoring. As a result, monitoring respiration using textile capacitive pressure sensor offers a promising possibility of convenient measurement of respiration rate (correlation (r＝0.9553, p<0.0001). In the result of usability and wearability test, all of categorizes(perceived change, wearability, movement, facility of management, usefulness) were received favorable evaluation on usability test( mean value : 3.8), and suitable location of TCPS in the clothing is deriven on the abdomen part. According to synthetical results, Basic smart clothing design based on respiration monitoring system is proposed.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.130-142
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• 2008

Different from other ontology languages, TopicMap is capable of integrating numerous amount of heterogenous information resources using the locational information without any information transformation. Although many conventional editors have been developed for topic maps, they are standalone-type only for writing XTM documents. As a result, these tools request too much time for handling large-scale data and provoke practical problems to integrate with legacy systems which are mostly based on relational database. In this paper, we model a large-scale topic map structure based on XTM 1.0 into RDB structure to minimize the processing time and build up the ontology in legacy systems. We implement a topic map platform called X-TOP that can enhance the efficiency of ontology construction and provide interoperability between XTM documents and database. Moreover, we can use conventional SQL tools and other application development tools for topic map construction in X-TOP. The X-TOP is implemented to have 3-tier architecture to support flexible user interfaces and diverse DBMS. This paper shows the usability of X-TOP by means of the comparison with conventional tools and the application to healthcare cancer ontology management.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.19 no.10
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• pp.569-577
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• 2018

This study was conducted to determine the effects of middle-aged women's social support and self-efficacy on their aging anxiety, with the ultimate goal of providing basic information for devising educational and interventive programs to help reduce aging anxiety. Participants of this study were 210 middle-aged women living in B Metropolitan City. Data were collected from May 10 to 28, 2018, and statistically processed using t-tests, ANOVA, Pearson's correlation coefficient and stepwise multiple regression analysis. Participants showed significant differences in aging anxiety depending on age, education, monthly income, marital life satisfaction, leisure time activities, and number of friends. In addition, aging anxiety had significant negative correlations with social support and self-efficacy, and the main factors affecting middle-aged women's aging anxiety were found to be self-efficacy, marital satisfaction and social support. Of these, self-efficacy had the greatest effect, explaining 42.7% of the participants' aging anxiety. To help middle-aged women reduce their aging anxiety, it is necessary to provide them with programs that improve social activity participation, raise self-efficacy and promote relationships with family and communities. It is also recommended that these women be provided with educational and interventive programs that help them adjust to aging and develop a positive awareness of it.

• Quality Improvement in Health Care
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.224-237
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• 1998

Background : This is an investigative study to analyse the importance of works perceived by Quality Improvement(QI) Coordinators and to evaluate their current work performances using the questionnaires developed by the investigator. Methods : The data were collected from 37 subjects over two weeks period from Oct. 1 to Oct. 17, 1998 and analysed by the descriptive statistics of SPSS program. The items of questionnaire are consisted of 13 work domains including 73 activities based on Quality Management(QM) Coordinator's job description of National Association for Healthcare Quality:data collection & analysis, communication, monitoring, evaluation, accreditation, tool development, policy development, program development, self development, education & trainning, system design, planning, and consultation & support. Results : 1) Of the performances in 13 work domains, the frequencies of the work performed were accreditation(89%), planning(88%), communication(83%), data collection & analysis(82%), monitoring(76%), policy development(72%), consultation & support (71%), education & trainning(70%), self development(68%), evaluation(63%), tool development(61%), program development(44%) and system design(43%) in order. 2) For the importances (1=not important, 5=very important), the policy development(4.46) scored highest then monitoring(4.42), planning(4.41), education & trainning(4.38), communication(4.35), evaluation(4.34) tool development (4.30), data collection & analysis(4.29), program development(4.22), consultation & support(4.22), accreditation(4.15), self development(4.05) and system design(3.98) in order. 3) There was a difference between the work performance and the perceived importance. The results showed the low performances in policy development, monitoring, education & trainning and evaluation which ranked high by the perceived importance and the high performances in accreditation, data collection & analysis, self development, communication and consultation & support which ranked middle to low by the perceived importance. 4) The reasons for low performances of QI Coordinators were the lack of clear assignment for the responsibility and allowed authority for work to QI Coordinators(30.8%), insufficient member of QI Coordinators(13.9%), lack of hospital director's interest(11.5%), low motivation of QI Coordinators (10.6%) and insufficient knowledge & experience of QI Coordinators (8.8%). Conclusion : Most works were perceived important by QI Coordinators, but there was a difference in the work performance. The works performed over 70% were related with accreditation, data collection & analysis, communication, planning and monitoring, on the other hand under 50% in performances were related with system design, program development, tool development and evaluation.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.355-367
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• 2018

The purpose of this study was to identify the predictors of the quality of life in community dwelling vulnerable older women with chronic joint pain. A cross-sectional study was conducted on 234 participants registered at a visiting health care service in the public health center of C-city. The structured questionnaire were used to collect data on the general characteristics, pain rating index, pain intensity, perceived health status, functional independence, sleep pattern, depression, and quality of life from February 16 to March 13, 2017. The data were analyzed using a t-test, ANOVA, Pearson's correlation coefficients, and hierarchical multiple regression analysis. The significant factors of the quality of life including general characteristics were depression (${\beta}=-.60$, p<.001), pain intensity scale (${\beta}=-.15$, p=.007), health insurance type (${\beta}=.15$, p=.001), perceived health status (${\beta}=.14$, p=.007), duration of pain (${\beta}=-.10$, p=.019), marital status (${\beta}=.10$, p=.024), and functional independence (${\beta}=.09$, p=.036). These factors accounted for 63.1% of the total variance in the quality of life. The findings suggest that a public healthcare program on managing depression is effective in improving the quality of life in community dwelling older women with chronic joint pain. Public health nurses should intervene in nursing care for economically vulnerable aged and pain management based on a precise assessment from the beginning of pain.