• Health Policy and Management
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.44-60
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• 2011

Background : Surgical site infection(SSI) is one of the important nosocomial infections with pneumonia, urinary tract infection. SSI increases mortality, morbidity, length of stay, and costs for postoperative patients. The purpose of this study was to estimate length of stay(LOS) and health care costs from SSI using the large observational data. The ultimate objective was to show the effect of prevention of SSI. Method : This study used antibiotic prophylaxis evaluation data and claims data of the HIRA(Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service). The study population included 18,361 patients who underwent gastric surgery, endoscopic cholecystectomy, colon surgery, hysterectomy, cesarean section in nationwide hospitals from August to October 2007. SSI group and non-SSI group were matched according to propensity score resulted from logistic regression. The paired t-test was used to compare the difference of the LOS and health care costs between SSI group and non-SSI group. Results : The 598 cases of SSI were detected of total subjects, and the crude SSI rate was 3.3%. For each surgery, SSI rates were 5.5% for gastric surgery, 4.7% for cholecystectomy, 6.6% for colon surgery, 2.6% for hysterectomy, and 1.6% for cesarean section. The 596 cases of SSI and the 596 cases of non-SSI were matched by propensity score. The LOS of SSI group was longer than that of non-SSI group, and the difference was statistically significant. Health care costs of SSI group was more than that of non-SSI group which was significant. Conclusions : SSI increased apparently the LOS and healthcare costs. The economic loss might affect the cost of national healthcare as well as patients and hospitals. This study provided the evidence that the healthcare expenditure could be reduced by preventing SSI.

• Human Ecology Research
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• v.58 no.4
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• pp.613-633
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• 2020

This study identifies consumers' perceived benefits and costs when using Samsung Health (a healthcare app) based on consumer reviews from Google Play Store's app and social media discourse. We examine the differences in the benefits and the costs of Samsung Health using these two sources of data. We conducted text frequency analysis, clustering analysis, and semantic network analysis using R programming. The major findings are as follows. First, consumers experience benefits and costs on several functions of the app, such as step counting, device interlocking, information acquisition, and competition with global consumers. Second, the results of semantic network analysis showed that there were eight benefit factors and three cost factors. We also found that the three costs correspond to the benefits, indicating that some consumers gained benefits from certain functions while others gained costs from the same functions. Third, the comparison between consumer app review and social media discourse showed that the former is appropriate to assess the performance of app functions, while the latter is appropriate to examine how the app is used in daily life and how consumers feel about it. The current study suggests managerial implications to healthcare app service providers regarding what they should strengthen and improve to enhance consumers' satisfaction. It also suggests some implications from the two media, which can be mutually complementary, for researchers who study consumer opinions.

• International Area Studies Review
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.239-267
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• 2009

Investment in health through an array of public health policies will lead to improvement of health at all levels, and the improved health can reduce the socioeconomic costs incurred with diseases. And finally, with reduced healthcare costs associated with diseases and health problems, economy will be able to achieve economic growth and development. Using simultaneous equations model, this study aims to identify this possible channel from public health policies to economic growth. Specifically, the policy effect is investigated on a basis of main disease groups and aging groups. The public health policies are proved to reduce healthcare costs related with disease groups including respiratory, digestive, circulative, and infectious disease, and with all age groups except 20~39 group. And the reduced healthcare costs have shown to increase the real gross domestic products in those group above.

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.31 no.3
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• pp.261-271
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• 2021

Background: In 2018, the government increased the fee for the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) image deciphering services of the external hospital to discourage the redundant MRI scan and to induce appropriate use of the MRI services. It is important to evaluate the effect of the policy to provide the basis for establishing other MRI-related policies. Methods: The healthcare data of the patients who had brain MRI scans were organized by episode and analyzed using the panel study in order to find out the effect of the MRI-related policy on the substitution effect and the medical expenses. Results: As a result of the increase in the fee of deciphering the MRI image, there has been an uplift in deciphering the MRI scan of the external hospital. It implies that more hospitals chose to use the MRI scan taken by other clinics or hospitals, rather than the MRI scan taken at their own facilities. Conclusion: The research results imply that a policy that facilitates the exchange of the medical image data between the hospitals is needed in order to establish an efficient management system of the healthcare resources. Such improvement is expected to reduce the social cost and contribute to the stability in the finance of national health insurance.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.44 no.4
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• pp.32-42
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• 2021

The printing process can have to print various colors with a limited capacity of printing facility such as ink containers that are needed cleaning to change color. In each container, cleaning time exists to assign corresponding inks, and it is considered as the setup cost required to reduce the increasing productivity. The existing manual method, which is based on the worker's experience or intuition, is difficult to respond to the diversification of color requirements, mathematical modeling and algorithms are suggested for efficient scheduling. In this study, we propose a new type of scheduling problem for the printing process. First, we suggest a mathematical model that optimizes the color assignment and scheduling. Although the suggested model guarantees global optimality, it needs a lot of computational time to solve. Thus, we decompose the original problem into sequencing orders and allocating ink problems. An approximate function is used to compute the job scheduling, and local search heuristic based on 2-opt algorithm is suggested for reducing computational time. In order to verify the effectiveness of our method, we compared the algorithms' performance. The results show that the suggested decomposition structure can find acceptable solutions within a reasonable time. Also, we present schematized results for field application.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.22 no.12
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• pp.245-251
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• 2022

In this paper, a high gain, broadband planar vivaldi antenna (PVA) by utilizing a broadband stripline feed is developed for wireless communication for IoT systems. The suggested antenna is designed by attaching a tapered-slot construction to a typical vivaldi antenna, which improves the antenna's radiation properties. The PVA is constructed on a low-cost FR4 substrate. The dimensions of the patch are 1.886λ₀×1.42λ₀×0.026λ₀, dielectric constant Ɛ_r=4.4, and loss tangent δ=0.02. The width of the feed line is reduced to improve the impedance bandwidth of the antenna. The computed reflection coefficient findings show that the suggested antenna has a 46.2% wider relative bandwidth calculated at a 10 dB return loss. At the resonance frequencies of 6.5 GHz, the studied results show an optimal gain of 5.82 dBi and 85% optimal radiation efficiency at the operable band. The optometric analysis of the proposed structure shows that the proposed antenna can achieve wide enough bandwidth at the desired frequency and hence make the designed antenna appropriate to work in satellite communication and medical internet of things (M-IoT) healthcare applications.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.121-132
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• 2011

A healthcare system is a type of medical information system that performs early detection and prevention in diseases by checking one's health condition periodically. Such a healthcare system is based on the signal obtained from the body. However, the developed existing system represents certain differences in the storage and description of vital signs according to medicare devices and the evaluation method of the system. It brings some disadvantages, such as lacks in the interoperability between systems, increases in the development cost of systems, and absence of a unified system. Thus, this study develops a healthcare system based on a meta model. For establishing this objective, this study describes and stores vital sign data based on the standard meta model of HL7 and applies OCL, which is a mathematical specification language, for defining wellness indexes and extracting data in order to evaluate health risk appraisals in health. In addition, this study implements components based on OSGi and assemble them in order to easily extend various devices and systems. By describing vital data based on the meta model, it represents some advantages that it makes possible to ensure the interoperability between systems and introduce the standardization of the evaluation method of health conditions through defining the wellness index using OCL. Also, it provides dear specifications.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.15 no.7
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• pp.259-269
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• 2017

This study analyzed medical aid case management effects based on the number of access by visits, phone calls, letters, internal investigation, resource links, and requests, in medical aid case management business that is carried out to improve the quality of life of medical care beneficiaries and reduce financial cost. Secondary analysis study using data of 564 high-risk group in the medical aid case management and their healthcare utilization data. Letters had positive correlations with the scores of all case management domains. The higher visits was, the lower the score of self-health care ability was, and the higher the number of phone calls was, the higher the score for reasonable medical use was. While there was no significant difference in medical cost according to aid management by interventions, the higher visits and resource links were, the lower the subjects' total number of payment days was. There is a difference in the various areas of the quality of health -related life and medical use depending on case management by intervention method and its number. It is necessary to carry out the efficient number of access to case management by intervention method.

• Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
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• v.39 no.5
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• pp.397-403
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• 2006

Objectives: We estimated the asthma-related health care utilization and costs in Korea from the insurer's and societal perspective. Methods: We extracted the insurance claims records from the Korea National Health Insurance claims database for determining the health care services provided to patients with asthma in 2003. Patients were defined as having asthma if they had ${\geq}$2 medical claims with diagnosis of asthma and they had been prescribed anti-asthma medicines, Annual claims records were aggeregated for each patient to produce patient-specific information on the total utilization and costs. The total asthma-related cost was the sum of the direct healthcare costs, the transportation costs for visits to health care providers and the patient's or caregivers' costs for the time spent on hospital or outpatient visits. Results: A total of 699,603people were identified as asthma patients, yielding an asthma prevalence of 1.47%. Each asthma patient had 7.56 outpatient visits, 0.01 ED visits and 0.02 admissions per year to treat asthma. The per-capita insurance-covered costs increased with age, from 128,276 Won for children aged 1 to 14 years to 270,729 Won for those aged 75 or older. The total cost in the nation varied from 121,865 million to 174,949 million Won depending on the perspectives. From a societal perspective, direct health care costs accounted for 84.9%, transportation costs for 15.1 % and time costs for 9.2% of the total costs. Conclusions: Hospitalizations and ED visits represented only a small portion of the asthma-related costs. Most of the societal burden was attributed to direct medical expenditures, with outpatient visits and medications emerging as the single largest cost components.

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.229-240
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• 2017

Background: This study purposed to analyze the spatial accessibility of women in childbearing age to the healthcare organizations (HCOs) providing delivery services in Gangwon-do. Methods: Network analysis was applied to assess the spatial accessibility based on the travel time and road travel distance. Travel time and travel distance were measured between the location of HCOs and the centroid of the smallest administrative areas, eup, myeon, and dong in Gangwon-do. Korean Transport Database Center provided road network GIS (Geographic Information System) Database in 2015 and it was used to build the network dataset. Two types of network analysis, service area analysis and origin-destination (OD)-cost matrix analysis, applied to the created network dataset. Service area analysis defined all-accessible areas that are within a specified time, and OD-cost matrix analysis measured the least-cost paths from the HCOs to the centroids. The visualization of the number of the HCOs and the number of women in childbearing age on the Ganwon-do map and network analysis were performed with ArcGIS ver. 10.0 (ESRI, Redlands, CA, USA). Results: Twenty HCOs were providing delivery services in Gangwon-do in 2016. Over 50% of the women in childbearing age were aged more than 35 years. Service area analysis found that 89.56% of Gangwon-do area took less than 60 minutes to reach any types of HCOs. For tertiary hospitals, about 74.37% of Gangwon-do area took more than 60 minutes. Except Wonju-si and Hoengseong-gun, other regions took more than 60 minutes to reach the tertiary hospital. Especially, Goseong-gun, Donghae-si, Samcheok-si, Sokcho-si, Yanggu-gun, Cheorwon-gun, and Taebaek-si took more than 100 minutes to the tertiary hospital. Conclusion: This study provided that the accessibility toward the tertiary hospital was limited and it may cause problems in high-risk delivery patients such as over 35 years. Health policy makers will need to handle the obstetric accessibility issues in Gangwon-do.