• Korean Circulation Journal
• /
• v.52 no.4
• /
• pp.324-337
• /
• 2022

Background and Objectives: Identifying patients with high bleeding risk (HBR) is important when making decisions for antiplatelet therapy strategy. This study evaluated the impact of ticagrelor monotherapy after 3-month dual antiplatelet therapy (DAPT) according to HBR in acute coronary syndrome (ACS) patients treated with drug eluting stents (DESs). Methods: In this post-hoc analysis of the TICO trial, HBR was defined by 2 approaches: meeting Academic Research Consortium for HBR (ARC-HBR) criteria or Predicting Bleeding Complications in Patients Undergoing Stent Implantation and Subsequent DAPT (PRECISE-DAPT) score ≥25. The primary outcome was a 3-12 months net adverse clinical event (composite of major bleeding and adverse cardiac and cerebrovascular events). Results: Of the 2,980 patients without adverse events during the first 3 months after DES implantation, 453 (15.2%) were HBR by ARC-HBR criteria and 504 (16.9%) were HBR by PRECISE-DAPT score. The primary outcome rate was higher in HBR versus non-HBR patients (by ARC-HBR criteria: hazard ratio [HR], 2.87; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.76-4.69; p<0.001; by PRECISE-DAPT score: HR, 3.09; 95% CI, 1.92-4.98; p<0.001). Ticagrelor monotherapy after 3-month DAPT was associated with lower primary outcome rate than ticagrelor-based 12-month DAPT regardless of HBR by ARC-HBR criteria, with similar magnitudes of therapy effect for HBR and non-HBR patients (p-interaction=0.400). Results were consistent by PRECISE-DAPT score (p-interaction=0.178). Conclusions: In ACS patients treated with DESs, ticagrelor monotherapy after 3-month DAPT was associated with lower rate of adverse clinical outcomes regardless of HBR, with similar magnitudes of therapy effect between HBR and non-HBR.

• Journal of Korean Society of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene
• /
• v.34 no.3
• /
• pp.202-213
• /
• 2024

Introduction: Acknowledging the global issue of diseases potentially caused by overwork, this study aims to develop an AI model to help workers understand the connection between cerebrocardiovascular diseases and their work environment. Materials and methods: The model was trained using medical and legal expertise along with data from the 2021 occupational disease adjudication certificate by the Industrial Accident Compensation Insurance and Prevention Service. The Polyglot-ko-5.8B model, which is effective for processing Korean, was utilized. Model performance was evaluated through accuracy, precision, sensitivity, and F1-score metrics. Results: The model trained on a comprehensive dataset, including expert knowledge and actual case data, outperformed the others with respective accuracy, precision, sensitivity, and F1-scores of 0.91, 0.89, 0.84, and 0.87. However, it still had limitations in responding to certain scenarios. Discussion: The comprehensive model proved most effective in diagnosing work-related cerebrocardiovascular diseases, highlighting the significance of integrating actual case data in AI model development. Despite its efficacy, the model showed limitations in handling diverse cases and offering health management solutions. Conclusion: The study succeeded in creating an AI model to discern the link between work factors and cerebrocardiovascular diseases, showcasing the highest efficacy with the comprehensively trained model. Future enhancements towards a template-based approach and the development of a user-friendly chatbot webUI for workers are recommended to address the model's current limitations.

• Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
• /
• v.5 no.1
• /
• pp.57-95
• /
• 1972

This study was conducted to assess the effectiveness of service by maternity aids concerning maternal and child health in improving simultaneously infant mortality, contraception and vital registration among expectant mothers in rural Korea, where there is less apportunity for maternal and child health care. It is unrealistic to expect to solve this problem in rural Korea through professional persons considering the situation of medical facilities and the socioeconomic condition of residents. So, we intended to adopt a system of services by maternity aids who were educated formally among indigenous women. After the women were trained in maternal and child health, contraception, and registration for a short period, they were assigned as a maternity aids to each village to help with various activities concerning maternal and child health, for example, registration of pregnant women, home visiting to check for complications, supplying of delivery kits, attendance at delivery, persuasion of contraception, and invitation for registration and so on. Mean-while, four researchers called on the maternity aids to collect materials concerning vital events, maternal child health, contraception and registration, and to give further instruction and supervision as the program proceeded. A. Changes of women's attitude by services of maternity aid. Now, we examined to what extent' such a service system to expectant mothers affected a change in attitude of women residing in the study area as compared to women of the control area. 1) In the birth and death places, there were no changes between last and present infants, in study or control area. 2) In regard to attendants at delivery, there were no changes except for a small percentage of attendance (8%) by maternity aid in study area. But, I expect that more maternity sids could be used as attendants at delivery if they would be trained further and if there was more explanation to the residents about such a service. 3) Considering the rate of utilization of sterilized delivery kit, I am sure that more than 90 percent would be used if the delivery kit were supplied in the proper time. There were significant differences in rates between the study and the control areas. 4) Taking into consideration the utilization rate of the clinic for prenatal care and well baby care, if suck facilities were installed, it would probably be well utilized. 5) In the contraception, the rate of approval was as high as 89 percent in study area as compared to 82 percent in the control area. 6) Considering the rate of pre-and post-partum acceptance on contraception were as much as 70 percent or more, if motivation to use contraception was given to them adequately, the government could reach the goals for family planning as planned. 7) In the vital registration, the rate of birth registration in the study area was some what improved compared to that of the control area, while the rate of death registration was not changed at all. Taking into account the fact that the rate of confirmation of vital events by maternity aids was remarkably high, if the registration system changed to a 'notification' system instead of formal registration ststem, it would be improved significantly compared to present system. B. Effect of the project Thus, with changes in the residents' attitude, was there a reduction in the infant death rate? 1) It is very difficult problem to compare the mortality of infants between last and present infants, because many women don't want to answer accurately about their dead children especially the infants that died within a few days after birth. In this study the data of present death comes from the maternity aides who followed up every pregnancy they had recorded to see what had happened. They seem to have very reliable information on what happened in first few weeks with follow up visitits to check out later changes. From these calculaton, when we compared the rate of infant death between last and present infant, there was remarkable reduction of death rate for present infant compare to that of last children, namely, the former was 30, while the latter 42. The figure is the lowest rate that I have ever heard. As the quality of data we could assess by comparing the causes of death. In the current death rate by communicable disease was much lower compare to the last child especially, tetanus cases and pneumonia. 2) Next, how many respondents used contraception after birth because of frequent contact with the maternity aid. In the registered cases, the respondents showed a tendency to practice contraception at an earlier age and with a small number of children. In a comparison of the rate of contraception between the study and the control area, the rate in the former was significantly higher than that of the latter. What is more, the proportion favoring smaller numbers of children and younger women rose in the study area as compared to the control area. 3) Regarding vital registration, though the rate of registration was gradually improved by efforts of maternity aid, it would be better to change the registration system. 4) In the crude birth rate, the rate in the study area was 22.2 while in the control area was 26.5. Natural increase rate showed 15.4 in the study area, while control area was 19.1. 5) In assessment of the efficiency of the maternity aids judging by the cost-effect viewpoint, the workers in the Medium area seemed to be more efficiency than those of other areas.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.22 no.1
• /
• pp.83-105
• /
• 2016

Measuring an individual's subjective wellbeing in an accurate, unobtrusive, and cost-effective manner is a core success factor of the wellbeing support system, which is a type of medical IT service. However, measurements with a self-report questionnaire and wearable sensors are cost-intensive and obtrusive when the wellbeing support system should be running in real-time, despite being very accurate. Recently, reasoning the state of subjective wellbeing with conventional sentiment analysis and unstructured data has been proposed as an alternative to resolve the drawbacks of the self-report questionnaire and wearable sensors. However, this approach does not consider contextual polarity, which results in lower measurement accuracy. Moreover, there is no sentimental word net or ontology for the subjective wellbeing area. Hence, this paper proposes a method to extract keywords and their contextual polarity representing the subjective wellbeing state from the unstructured text in online websites in order to improve the reasoning accuracy of the sentiment analysis. The proposed method is as follows. First, a set of general sentimental words is proposed. SentiWordNet was adopted; this is the most widely used dictionary and contains about 100,000 words such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs with polarities from -1.0 (extremely negative) to 1.0 (extremely positive). Second, corpora on subjective wellbeing (SWB corpora) were obtained by crawling online text. A survey was conducted to prepare a learning dataset that includes an individual's opinion and the level of self-report wellness, such as stress and depression. The participants were asked to respond with their feelings about online news on two topics. Next, three data sources were extracted from the SWB corpora: demographic information, psychographic information, and the structural characteristics of the text (e.g., the number of words used in the text, simple statistics on the special characters used). These were considered to adjust the level of a specific SWB. Finally, a set of reasoning rules was generated for each wellbeing factor to estimate the SWB of an individual based on the text written by the individual. The experimental results suggested that using contextual polarity for each SWB factor (e.g., stress, depression) significantly improved the estimation accuracy compared to conventional sentiment analysis methods incorporating SentiWordNet. Even though literature is available on Korean sentiment analysis, such studies only used only a limited set of sentimental words. Due to the small number of words, many sentences are overlooked and ignored when estimating the level of sentiment. However, the proposed method can identify multiple sentiment-neutral words as sentiment words in the context of a specific SWB factor. The results also suggest that a specific type of senti-word dictionary containing contextual polarity needs to be constructed along with a dictionary based on common sense such as SenticNet. These efforts will enrich and enlarge the application area of sentic computing. The study is helpful to practitioners and managers of wellness services in that a couple of characteristics of unstructured text have been identified for improving SWB. Consistent with the literature, the results showed that the gender and age affect the SWB state when the individual is exposed to an identical queue from the online text. In addition, the length of the textual response and usage pattern of special characters were found to indicate the individual's SWB. These imply that better SWB measurement should involve collecting the textual structure and the individual's demographic conditions. In the future, the proposed method should be improved by automated identification of the contextual polarity in order to enlarge the vocabulary in a cost-effective manner.

• Korea Journal of Hospital Management
• /
• v.9 no.1
• /
• pp.66-94
• /
• 2004

The objective of this study is to examine how to maximize the efficiency of hospital management by minimizing the unit cost of hospital operation. For this purpose, this paper proposes to develop a model of the profit maximization based on the cost minimization dictum using the statistical tools of arriving at the maximum likelihood values. The preliminary survey data are collected from the annual statistics and their analyses published by Korea Health Industry Development Institute and Korean Hospital Association. The maximum likelihood value statistical analyses are conducted from the information on the cost (function) of each of 36 hospitals selected by the random stratified sampling method according to the size and location (urban or rural) of hospitals. We believe that, although the size of sample is relatively small, because of the sampling method used and the high response rate, the power of estimation of the results of the statistical analyses of the sample hospitals is acceptable. The conceptual framework of analyses is adopted from the various models of the determinants of hospital costs used by the previous studies. According to this framework, the study postulates that the unit cost of hospital operation is determined by the size, scope of service, technology (production function) as measured by capacity utilization, labor capital ratio and labor input-mix variables, and by exogeneous variables. The variables to represent the above cost determinants are selected by using the step-wise regression so that only the statistically significant variables may be utilized in analyzing how these variables impact on the hospital unit cost. The results of the analyses show that the models of hospital cost determinants adopted are well chosen. The various models analyzed have the (goodness of fit) overall determination (R2) which all turned out to be significant, regardless of the variables put in to represent the cost determinants. Specifically, the size and scope of service, no matter how it is measured, i. e., number of admissions per bed, number of ambulatory visits per bed, adjusted inpatient days and adjusted outpatients, have overall effects of reducing the hospital unit costs as measured by the cost per admission, per inpatient day, or office visit implying the existence of the economy of scale in the hospital operation. Thirdly, the technology used in operating a hospital has turned out to have its ramifications on the hospital unit cost similar to those postulated in the static theory of the firm. For example, the capacity utilization as represented by the inpatient days per employee tuned out to have statistically significant negative impacts on the unit cost of hospital operation, while payroll expenses per inpatient cost has a positive effect. The input-mix of hospital operation, as represented by the ratio of the number of doctor, nurse or medical staff per general employee, supports the known thesis that the specialized manpower costs more than the general employees. The labor/capital ratio as represented by the employees per 100 beds is shown to have a positive effect on the cost as expected. As for the exogeneous variable's impacts on the cost, when this variable is represented by the percent of urban 100 population at the location where the hospital is located, the regression analysis shows that the hospitals located in the urban area have a higher cost than those in the rural area. Finally, the case study of the sample hospitals offers a specific information to hospital administrators about how they share in terms of the cost they are incurring in comparison to other hospitals. For example, if his/her hospital is of small size and located in a city, he/she can compare the various costs of his/her hospital operation with those of other similar hospitals. Therefore, he/she may be able to find the reasons why the cost of his/her hospital operation has a higher or lower cost than other similar hospitals in what factors of the hospital cost determinants.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Food Science and Nutrition
• /
• v.39 no.9
• /
• pp.1305-1312
• /
• 2010

The purpose of this study was to investigate the perception and satisfaction on the nutrition counseling service for patients consuming a therapeutic diet at hospitals in Busan. The subjects were 153 inpatients at five hospitals with over 400 beds each. The research was performed through the interviewing process using questionnaires conducted from January to February, 2008. In a total of 88 patients, 57.5% had experienced nutrition counseling and were through the motives of counseling with doctors 64.2% and themselves 29.3% of the patients. In the method of nutrition counseling, 58% of the patients had an individual counseling. In the patients' perception on the nutrition counseling, 75.0% of the patients understood very well, 83.0% of them perceived the explanation as very important, 79.5% were very satisfied and 78.7% were helped in nutrition-management. On a scale of 5.00 for the nutrition counseling satisfaction, the average scores were 3.80 for 'explanation of knowledge', 3.71 for 'cognitive communication skills', 4.05 for 'effective communication skills' and 3.60 for 'facilitation skills'. The items of low scores in the nutrition counseling satisfaction were 'follow up diet-therapy after discharge', 'providing to personalized nutrition information', 'presentation of specific menu' and 'methods of menu planning'. There were significant (p<0.01) positive correlation between perception and satisfaction on the nutrition counseling. Therefore, it was suggested that dietitians increase the patients' satisfaction on the nutrition counseling with developing the model based on the patient-centered counseling.

• Journal of Home Health Care Nursing
• /
• v.4
• /
• pp.5-22
• /
• 1997

The purpose of the study was to development an information delivery system for the home nursing service, to demonstrate and to evaluate the efficiency of it. The period of research conduct was from September 1996 to August 31, 1997. At the 1st stage to achieve the purpose, Firstly Assessment tool for the patients with cerebral vascular disease who have the first priority of HNS among the patients with various health problems at home was developed through literature review. Secondly, after identification of patient nursing problem by the home care nurse with the assessment tool, the patient's classification system developed by Park (1988) that was 128 nursing activities under 6 categories was used to identify the home care nurse's activities of the patient with CAV at home. The research team had several workshops with 5 clinical nurse experts to refine it. At last 110 nursing activities under 11 categories for the patients with CVA were derived. At the second stage, algorithms were developed to connect 110 nursing activities with the patient nursing problems identified by assessment tool. The computerizing process of the algorithms is as follows: These algorithms are realized with the computer program by use of the software engineering technique. The development is made by the prototyping method, which is the requirement analysis of the software specifications. The basic features of the usability, compatibility, adaptability and maintainability are taken into consideration. Particular emphasis is given to the efficient construction of the database. To enhance the database efficiency and to establish the structural cohesion, the data field is categorized with the weight of relevance to the particular disease. This approach permits the easy adaptability when numerous diseases are applied in the future. In paralleled with this, the expandability and maintainability is stressed through out the program development, which leads to the modular concept. However since the disease to be applied is increased in number as the project progress and since they are interrelated and coupled each other, the expand ability as well as maintainability should be considered with a big priority. Furthermore, since the system is to be synthesized with other medical systems in the future, these properties are very important. The prototype developed in this project is to be evaluated through the stage of system testing. There are various evaluation metrics such as cohesion, coupling and adaptability so on. But unfortunately, direct measurement of these metrics are very difficult, and accordingly, analytical and quantitative evaluations are almost impossible. Therefore, instead of the analytical evaluation, the experimental evaluation is to be applied through the test run by various users. This system testing will provide the viewpoint analysis of the user's level, and the detail and additional requirement specifications arising from user's real situation will be feedback into the system modeling. Also. the degree of freedom of the input and output will be improved, and the hardware limitation will be investigated. Upon the refining, the prototype system will be used as a design template. and will be used to develop the more extensive system. In detail. the relevant modules will be developed for the various diseases, and the module will be integrated by the macroscopic design process focusing on the inter modularity, generality of the database. and compatibility with other systems. The Home care Evaluation System is comprised of three main modules of : (1) General information on a patient, (2) General health status of a patient, and (3) Cerebrovascular disease patient. The general health status module has five sub modules of physical measurement, vitality, nursing, pharmaceutical description and emotional/cognition ability. The CVA patient module is divided into ten sub modules such as subjective sense, consciousness, memory and language pattern so on. The typical sub modules are described in appendix 3.

• Korean Journal of Veterinary Service
• /
• v.21 no.3
• /
• pp.285-300
• /
• 1998

1. The number of average milking cows, clinical forms of mastitis, mastitis-developing cows, and cows killed by mastitis a year were 25.7, 1.8(7%), 6.3(26%), and 2.7(10.1%)heads, respectively. The annual grade changes of standard plate counts(SPC) and somatic cell counts(SCC) showed the grade 1A of SPC diminished sharply from April to August, we think it was due to the lack of proper management in farming season and the grade 3 of SCC indirectly influenced increased in huge during August. 2. The average number of parturitions of farms was 2.3, but 50% of below 1 parturition were 22 farms(31%), 50% of above 3 parturitions were 16(23%) out of 71 farms. According to grades of the number of parturitions of milking cows per each farm, the farms' grades recording 3 parturitions and 50% were little bit excellent. 3. The actual situation research of foremilking CMT revealed 35 out of 74 farmer didn't do CMT Among them(35 out of 74 farmers), 80% did not test thanks to the troublesome process of the CMT. SCC grade 3, among farms who did foremilking CMT once or twice a month and who did not were 29% and 40% respectively and SPC grade 1A were 55% and 9%, respectively. 4. The research of actual situation on milking management let us know 29 farms(39%) did not do lastmilking, 37 farms(49%) usually did overmilking, and 34 farms(46%) did milking for 4 or 5 minutes. Grades according to average requiring times of milking showed SCC grade 1 of farms milking within 7 minutes was 11% and SPC grade 1A was 34%, on the other side, farms milking more than 7 minutes were 0% in SCC grade 1 and 13% in SPC grade 1A. Grades according to the starting time of milking after rubbing teats showed SPC grade 1A of farms starting milking at about 1 minute and over 2 minutes were 50% and 20%, respectively. 5. The research of actual situation on hygienic milking management uncovered 65 farms(88%) were using one towel which was used in washing teats and udders to wash more than 3 to 4 cows, and 53 farms(72%) were using one dried towel to dry udders not for each cow but for more than 3 to 4 cows after washing. Also, on milking turns disclosed 30 farms(40%) were milking cows in the order of incoming without isolation of a dominant group. According to grades of towels used in washing teats and udders, farms using a towel for each cow were 56% and a towel for over 3 cows were 31% in SPC grade 1A. According to using-or-not grades of dried towels after washing udders, farms using a towel for each cow were 79% and a towel for over 3 cows were 21% in SPC grade 1A. 6. Farms doing teat-dipping before milking were 7(10%), not doing teat-dipping after milking, or doing sometimes were 9(12%), and doing right after milking were 57(77%). And farms doing teat-dipping after dry cows and before delivery were 21(28a ). Farms using bethadine as an antiseptic solution were 70(95%), 40 farms(59%) diluted it with water as weak as 5 to 10 times, and on drying cows 64 farms(87%) slowly did it more than 2 days. Grade 1A of SPC of farms doing teat-dipping at every milking was 38%, farms doing occasionally or not was 33%, and farms doing it right after milking was 37% and doing after milking more than 5 cows was 20%. Grade 1A of SPC among farms diluting bethadine 5 times and diluting 5 to 10 times with water were 36% and 33%, respectively, and Grade 3 of SCC were 35% and 32%, respectively. 7. Studies on nonlactating period medical treatment, as the cows were on dry, 54 farms treated with their own hands.73 farms(98%) had bovine mastitis treated for themselves. And on applying medicines against mastitis, 55 farmers chose them on the basis of their own experience, 42 farms(57%) were treated more than 3 days. 41 farms(55%) dumped away the mastitis infected milk separately, 24 farms(32%) were feeding and milking at the same time. 8. Fifty-six farms(76%) always washed and disinfected milking machines after milking. Farms using the milking machines at low, or variable vacuum pressures, or at the vacuum pressure, set at the moment of its installation were 31(42%), and farms that did not know pulsation ratio were 27(37%). Farms changing liners when they were torn 8(11%), 58 farms(78%) said they checked milking system when there were wrong with them, 31 farms(42%) changed milking hoses when they found out problems, and 42 farms(57%) cleaned vacuum and milking systems when they felt dirty. The SPC grade 1A of farms washing and sterilizing milking machines was 38% and farms only washing was 28%.

• Journal of Hospice and Palliative Care
• /
• v.7 no.2
• /
• pp.200-213
• /
• 2004

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to create an electronic nursing record form to build a hospice nursing process database to be used in the u-hospital EMR system. Specific aims of the study were: 1. To generate a complete, accurate, and simple electronic nursing record form. 2. To verify its appropriateness following documentation with the standardized hospice protocol. 3. To verify its validity and finalize the hospice nursing process database through discussion among hospice professionals. Methods: Nursing records from three independent hospice organizations were collected and analyzed by five expert hospice nurses with more than 10 years of experience, and a nursing record database was developed. This database was applied to 81 hospice patients at three hospice organizations to verify its completeness. Results: 1. An electronic nursing record form with completeness, accuracy, and simplicity was developed. 2. The completeness of the standardized home hospice service protocol was 95.86 percent. 3. The hospice nursing process database contains 18 items on health problems, 79 items on related causes and major symptoms, and 229 items on nursing interventions. Conclusion: The new nursing record form and database will reduce documentation time and articulate and streamline the working process among team members. They can also improve the quality of hospice services, and ultimately enable us to estimate hospice service costs.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
• /
• v.30 no.2
• /
• pp.99-128
• /
• 2008

Nearly all Koreans are insured through National Health Insurance(NHI). While NHI coverage is nearly universal, it is not complete. Coverage is largely limited to minimal level of hospital and physician expenses, and copayments are required in each case. As a result, Korea's public insurance system covers roughly 50% of overall individual health expenditures, and the remaining 50% consists of copayments for basic services, spending on services that are either not covered or poorly covered by the public system. In response to these gaps in the public system, 64% of the Korean population has supplemental private health insurance. Expansion of private health insurance raises negative externality issue. Like public financing schemes in other countries, the Korean system imposes cost-sharing on patients as a strategy for controlling utilization. Because most insurance policies reimburse patients for their out-of-pocket payments, supplemental insurance is likely to negate the impact of the policy, raising both total and public sector health spending. So far, most empirical analysis of supplemental health insurance to date has focused on the US Medigap programme. It is found that those with supplements apparently consume more health care. Two reasons for higher health care consumption by those with supplements suggest themselves. One is the moral hazard effect: by eliminating copayments and deductibles, supplements reduce the marginal price of care and induce additional consumption. The other explanation is that supplements are purchased by those who anticipate high health expenditures - adverse effect. The main issue addressed has been the separation of the moral hazard effect from the adverse selection one. The general conclusion is that the evidence on adverse selection based on observable variables is mixed. This article investigates the extent to which private supplementary insurance affect use of health care services by public health insurance enrollees, using Korean administrative data and private supplements related data collected through all relevant private insurance companies. I applied a multivariate two-part model to analyze the effects of various types of supplements on the likelihood and level of public health insurance spending and estimated marginal effects of supplements. Separate models were estimated for inpatients and outpatients in public insurance spending. The first part of the model estimated the likelihood of positive spending using probit regression, and the second part estimated the log of spending for those with positive spending. Use of a detailed information of individuals' public health insurance from administration data and of private insurance status from insurance companies made it possible to control for health status, the types of supplemental insurance owned by theses individuals, and other factors that explain spending variations across supplemental insurance categories in isolating the effects of supplemental insurance. Data from 2004 to 2006 were used, and this study found that private insurance increased the probability of a physician visit by less than 1 percent and a hospital admission by about 1 percent. However, supplemental insurance was not found to be associated with a bigger health care service utilization. Two-part models of health care utilization and expenditures showed that those without supplemental insurance had higher inpatient and outpatient expenditures than those with supplements, even after controlling for observable differences.