• The Korean Society of Law and Medicine
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.275-307
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• 2010

In the presidential new-year address in January 2, 2009, the President declared that 17 kinds of new driving force of growth that could create high-added value be selected to step up job creation and an increase in national wealth. The Ministry of Strategy & Finance announced plans for the 17 kinds of new driving force of growth after the presidential address. Specifically, that ministry announced an ambitious plan to select health care service named 'Global Health Care' as one of the five service industries that could create high-added value in a move to provide jobs to approximately 7,000 people and produce pervasive economic effects coming up to a trillion and 10 billion won. To attain the goal, several action plans were mapped out to globalize domestic medical institutions, to rearrange the relevant law and system for the purposes of raising awareness of domestic medical institutions among foreign patients and improving their accessibility and post-satisfaction level, and to lure lots of foreign patients through financial assistance. At the same time, the government announced plans to lure severe patients such as those in want of surgery or organ transplant, cancer patients or patients with heart diseases to create high-added value on a long-term basis. Thus, the government announced that it planned to formulate such strategies and to enter an agreement with foreign governments to attract plenty of foreign patients. In fact, however, there are little full-scale evaluation of medical tourism though it's been a year since it was introduced, and there are few actual efforts to implement what the government announced, either. According to the results of the evaluation of medical tourism, domestic hospitals are said to undergo little significant changes after the introduction of medical tourism, which shows that they take a dim view of medical tourism instead of having expectations for that. The medical tourism industries in major Asian countries have been dynamized, and there are several factors of their success. First of all, they are successful in creating new market opportunities by incorporating related industries such as medicine, tourism and IT and in developing medical tourism products and differentiated marketing by taking advantage of their competitive edge. They have offered full-fledged assistance to this sector, and another reason is the improved international credibility of their medical service. If our country fails to pinpoint our problems in consideration of the cases of the Asian countries or to provide appropriate financial aid, our country is bound to lag behind them. Given this reality, how to assess medical tourism and what challenges this sector is confronted with are discussed.

• Journal of Korea Technology Innovation Society
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.335-359
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• 2009

This study explores the IT governance structures of the Korean conglomerates. It investigates IT organization structures, decision making frameworks and processes, communication channels, implementation mechanisms, and performance evaluation methods around IT activities of the Korean conglomerates by analyzing four different cases. The results show that all of the conglomerates have an IT service firms as one of their subsidiaries, and all the subsidiaries in the conglomerates outsource their IT divisions to the IT service firms, The client firms in the conglomerates operate IT strategy and planning teams to coordinate their IT activities with their outsourcing partners. The IT governance archetype of the Korean conglomerates is found to be "business monarchy" because the client firms mostly make IT decisions. However, the IT service firms provide the information of IT trends and solutions to their clients, so the IT governance archetype of input framework for IT decisions can be "IT monarchy". In addition, the conglomerate which has the more centralized IT governance architecture appears to prefer the more integrated implementation mechanisms for IT decisions. The results of this study are expected to be used as a benchmarking model for the organizations which try to develop an effective IT governance structure.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.241-249
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• 2010

The purpose of this study is to provide basic information for marketing strategy for hospitals in Busan Metropolitan area by investigating of the web-site management and effect on hospital management about the web-sites managers. Survey of 53 web-site managers was taken between May 1st and May 25th 2008. The survey was carried out to gather information about characteristics of web-site managers and creating, managing and operating process of web-sites and web-sites' effect and information sharing abilities. The results of survey are as follows. First, most of hospitals' web-sites were launched between 2001 to 2005 via outsourcing. Most of hospitals spent about one to three million won for their web-sites and renew web-sites every year. Most of these web-sites have hospital PR, Q&A, and on-line support functions. Second, most of whom participated in survey have agreed that a hospital web-site has influence in hospital management in various categories such as introducing hospital to medical examination, making doctor's appointment, providing patient guidance, providing medical information, and patient counselling. This study shows that effects of web-sites are closely related to web-site satisfaction level. Therefore, to raise the hospital satisfaction level, it is necessary for hospitals to put more efforts in creating web-site that provides more medical information and improved on-line services.