• Quality Improvement in Health Care
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.64-80
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• 1997

Background : An important issue in health care today is in trying to center service around the hospitalized patient. There is a "Kindness Movement" developing now, where in the focus of Health Care is being changed from simply treating the basic physical needs of the patient with sophisticated technology, to keeping emotional well being healthy with more humane and attentive treatment. In our attempt to reach the goal of a completely satisfied patient, we undertook a study of the common complaints of patients, and the subsequent nature of the interventions. Method : The study was carried out in two stages, first the patients made known their complaints by filling out questionnaires, then we collected data on the attempts to alleviate the complaints. The questionnaire provided 19 different complaints, which were then analysed for such variables as content, source of complaint, persons treating the complaint, and length of time and method used to solve the complaint. Results : 1. The Chief complaints made by patients(99.1%) were of physical discomfort, such as pain, nausea, vomiting, indigestion, diarrhea and constipation. 2. The complaints were voiced primarily by either of the patient's family, or by the patients themselves(78.4). 3. The complaints were intervened by nurses alone(53.5%), physicians alone(25.5%), or by nurses and physicians together(19.25%). 4, The method by which the complaints were resolved included the utilization of prescriptions(55.7%), further explanation and education(25. 5%) and notification after treatment(13.2%). 5. Most complaints were voiced during the dayshift(42.6%, 7:00-15:00), followed by the evening shift(36.0% 15:00~22:00), and then the nightshift(21.3 %, 22:00-07:00). 6. The time required for successful resolution of the patient's problems varied from 10~88.9min, according to the nature of the complaint. Conclusion : Hopefully by knowing beforehand the nature of both complaint and intervention, we can anticipate problems and shorten reaction time, in order to provide for a more satisfied patient.

• Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
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• v.45 no.5
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• pp.283-290
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• 2012

Objectives: People who have chronic diseases, as well as gait imbalance or psychiatric drug use, may be susceptible to injuries from falls and slips. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of musculoskeletal diseases on incidental fall-related injuries among adults in Korea. Methods: We analyzed data from the 4th Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (2007-2009), which are national data obtained by a rolling survey sampling method. The 1-year incidence of fall-related injuries was defined by health service utilization within the last year due to injury occurring after a slip and fall, and musculoskeletal diseases included osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, osteoporosis, and back pain. To evaluate the effects of preexisting musculoskeletal diseases, adults diagnosed before the last year were considered the exposed group, and adults who had never been diagnosed were the unexposed group. Results: The weighted lifetime prevalence of musculoskeletal disease was 32 540 per 100 000 persons. Musculoskeletal diseases were associated with a higher risk of fall-related injury after adjustment for sex, age, residence, household income, education, occupation, visual disturbance, paralysis due to stroke, and medication for depression (odds ratio [OR], 1.41; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.03 to 1.93). As the number of comorbid musculoskeletal diseases increased, the risk of fall-induced injuries increased (p-value for trend <0.001). In particular, patients who had any musculoskeletal condition were at much higher risk of recurrent fall-related injuries (OR, 6.20; 95% CI, 1.06 to 36.08). Conclusions: One must take into account the risk of fall-related injuries and provide prevention strategies among adults who have musculoskeletal diseases.

• Journal of the Korean Dietetic Association
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.23-35
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• 2008

Improved nutritional intake contributes to maintaining health and quality of life in elderly population and also reducing individual and social medical costs. Most of nutrition assistance programs for elderly, such as congregate or home-delivered meal programs, are not currently serviced in rural communities mainly due to low cost efficiency of program operation. However, the needs and necessity of such programs are presumed to be higher in rural area where the population density of elderly at nutritional risk is relatively high. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to develop a community-based meal program for the rural elderly. In 2007, four rural communities located in Jeon-Nam province were selected and the pilot meal program was applied for three months. Following are key features of the meal program model developed in this study: 1) meal production and service are operated by elderly participants to overcome the voluntary personnel shortage 2) utilization of locally-produced foods is maximized to reduce the meal cost, 3) traditional cooking methods are applied to adjust the food preference of elderly, and 4) foods are serviced on site to minimize the food safety problem possibly caused by delivery process. The pilot programs resulted in high satisfaction with the programs of participating elderly. The community-based meal program model developed in this study is expected to be used as an effective nutrition and health intervention model for the rural elderly.

• Journal of information and communication convergence engineering
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• v.9 no.5
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• pp.577-582
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• 2011

EMR(Electronic Medical Record) is an emerging technology that is highly-blended between non-IT and IT area. One of methodology to link non-IT and IT area is to construct databases. Nowadays, it supports before and after-treatment for patients and should satisfy all stakeholders such as practitioners, nurses, researchers, administrators and financial department and so on. In accordance with the database maintenance, DAS (Data as Service) model is one solution for outsourcing. However, there are some scalability and strategy issues when we need to plan to use DAS model properly. We constructed three kinds of databases such as plain-text, MS built-in encryption which is in-house model and custom AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) - DAS model scaling from 5K to 2560K records. To perform custom AES-DAS better, we also devised Bucket Index using Bloom Filter. The simulation showed the response times arithmetically increased in the beginning but after a certain threshold, exponentially increased in the end. In conclusion, if the database model is close to in-house model, then vendor technology is a good way to perform and get query response times in a consistent manner. If the model is DAS model, it is easy to outsource the database, however, some technique like Bucket Index enhances its utilization. To get faster query response times, designing database such as consideration of the field type is also important. This study suggests cloud computing would be a next DAS model to satisfy the scalability and the security issues.

• Journal of The Korea Institute of Healthcare Architecture
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.7-15
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• 2003

Contemporary hospital has more and more extension because the growth and change of hospital has to respond the various needs. For expanding, the sky bridge(sky walk) becomes one of the method to interconnect two or more buildings on the air. Sometimes the designers don't know exactly how the sky bridge works after construction. Beyond the role of interconnecting two buildings, the role of sky bridge is transformed the main axis of pedestrian in the whole hospital organization. This scope of analysis is about the sky bridge of Hanyang University hospital. The first method is the investigation of the utilization in this time. The second is the analysis of design drawings got form the designing of the past(1994-1998). From this analysis, the conclusions are followings.；The designer who wants to apply the sky bridge should more consider about, 1) how the sky bridge impacts the whole spatial system such as the pedestrian, patients, physicians, service's facilities etc. 2) what the inside of sky bridge has something such as natural light, ventilation, and the height, depth, width of aisle, the sign for seeking orientation. etc. In future the research relating sky bridge should be studied some hospital as well as one hospital for comparing the characteristics of the concepts and organizations

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.547-552
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• 2013

To investigate patient, cancer and treatment characteristics in females with breast cancer from more remote areas of Australia, to better understand reasons for their poorer outcomes, bi-variable and multivariable analyses were undertaken using the National Breast Cancer Audit database of the Society of Breast Surgeons of Australia and New Zealand. Results indicated that patients from more remote areas were more likely to be of lower socio-economic status and be treated in earlier diagnostic epochs and at inner regional and remote rather than major city centres. They were also more likely to be treated by low case load surgeons, although this finding was only of marginal statistical significance in multivariable analysis (p=0.074). Patients from more remote areas were less likely than those from major cities to be treated by breast conserving surgery, as opposed to mastectomy, and less likely to have adjuvant radiotherapy when having breast conserving surgery. They had a higher rate of adjuvant chemotherapy. Further monitoring will be important to determine whether breast conserving surgery and adjuvant radiotherapy utilization increase in rural patients following the introduction of regional cancer centres recently funded to improve service access in these areas.

• Asian Oncology Nursing
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.155-162
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• 2011

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the actual care costs paid to Korean Oncology Advanced Practice Nurses (KOAPN). Methods: We collected data using a group discussion and questionnaire identified 115 tasks from job descriptions developed by the Korean Accreditation Board of Nursing. Forty-two KOAPN working at three university hospitals in Seoul were asked to evaluate each task as to type and whether the cost is paid or not. They were also asked to indicate the tasks in urgent need of development of a care cost with high priority. Results: Only five tasks (4.3%) related to treatment and complication related interventions or education were paid, and they were paid only once during the entire treatment period and were not covered by national health insurance. It was approved as a medical fee by health insurance review & assessment service. Furthermore, the names of the authority (doctor) and the actual provider (nurse) of the prescriptions were different for three of those tasks. Most of the suggested tasks needing development of care costs were actions specifically performed by nurses (physical-psychosocial-spiritual assessment, independent nursing interventions). Conclusion: KOAPN are currently paid for few tasks. To maximize the utilization of KOAPN, the establishment of a clear rational payment system directly related to their actual activities is needed.

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.17-40
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• 2006

With the prospect of rapidly growing health insurance expenditures, particularly spending for ambulatory care, the introduction of a case-based payment method is discussed as an alternative to the current fee-for-service based method. A system to measure case mixes of providers is a core component of such payment systems. The objective of this study were to develop a classification system for ambulatory care, Korean Ambulatory Patient Group (KAPG) based on the U.S. APG version 2.0 and to evaluate the classification accuracy of the system. A database of 64,258,386 records was constructed from insurance claims submitted to the Health Insurance Review Agency (HIRA) during three months from August 2002. A total of 41,347,307 records with a single visit was used for the development and 7% random sample of the database was used for the evaluation. Additional groups were defined to include both physician and hospital fees in the classification, age splits were added to classify the entire population as well as the population older than 65, and the definition of medical groups used by the HIRA was adopted. The variance reduction in charges achieved by KAPGs was computed to evaluate the accuracy of classification. A total of 474 KAPGs was defined compare to 290 groups in the U.S. APG. The variance reduction for charges of all visits ranged from 20% to 37% depending on the type of provider, and ranged from 22% to 42% for non-outliers, that were better than those achieved by the system currently used by the .HIRA for its internal review purpose. Although further study is required to improve the classification for complicated care in larger hospitals, the results indicated that KAPGs could be used for better management of costs for ambulatory care.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.269-290
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• 2007

RSS is a core component of Web 2.0 which is expected to lead the most important innovation in the new IT environment. In that sense, it is actively utilized to distribute Web contents in various areas such as news, blog, multimedia, medical information, and conference and journal information. Also, it is expected to be a major effective marketing tool in electronic commerce domain. In the paper, we analyzed the problems of current utilization of RSS in domestic shopping malls, and suggest requirements for the effective use of RSS in electronic commerce. Furthermore, we proposed various issues and answers on the implementation of the requirements, and designed the intelligent RSS framework for electronic commerce based on the issues. Syntactic and semantic interoperability between the RSS service provider and the user is one of the most important issues in the framework. We suggested how to implement the interoperability based on Semantic Web technologies.

• Korean Journal of Health Education and Promotion
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• v.31 no.2
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• pp.65-78
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• 2014

Objectives: The aim of this study is to evaluate promotional Internet health information on health functional foods with regard to labeling information, website structure, and overall quality. Methods : The websites of 15 producers of three health functional foods (Red ginseng, vitamin, aloe) were selected. Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (MFDS) required labeling information was used to evaluate the integrity of basic information, and the structural properties of the websites were investigated. Moreover, DISCERN instrument was used to evaluate reliability and quality of information. Results : 1) Among MFDS required labeling information, seven items, including 'sell by date', and 'possible side effects' were not fully specified, and only 6.7% of Internet advertisements provided 'possible side effects'. 2) Each of 92.9% of these websites offered 'Introducation to websites and producers', and 'customer service', whereas only 64.3% and 42.9% of these websites offered 'FAQ about website utilization' and 'multilingual support', respectively. 3) The evaluation using DISCERN instrument showed the scores of $2.03{\pm}0.24$ in reliability, $1.87{\pm}0.28$ in quality, and $2.10{\pm}0.55$ in overall quality. Conclusions : Current promotional Internet health information on health functional foods has various weaknesses in terms of reliability and quality that need to be improved.