• Korea Journal of Hospital Management
• /
• 제8권1호
• /
• pp.135-164
• /
• 2003

The operating room is the major facility that costs the highest investment per unit area in a hospital. It requires commitment of hospital resources such as manpower, equipments and material. The quantity of these resources committed actually differs from one type of operation to another. Because of this, it is not an easy task to allocate the operating cost to individual clinical departments that share the operating room. A practical way to do so may be to collect and add the operating costs incurred by each clinical department and charge the net cost to the account of the corresponding clinical department. It has been customary to allocate the cost of the operating room to the account of each individual department on the basis of the ratio of the number of operations of the department or the total revenue by each operating room. In an attempt to set up more rational cost allocation method than the customary method, this study proposes a new cost allocation method that calls for itemizing the operation cost into its constituent expenses in detail and adding them up for the operating cost incurred by each individual department. For comparison of the new method with the conventional method, the operating room in the main building of hospital A near Seoul is chosen as a study object. It is selected because it is the biggest operating room in hospital A and most of operations in this hospital are conducted in this room. For this study the one-month operation record performed in January 2001 in this operating room is analyzed to allocate the per-month operation cost to six clinical departments that used this operating room; the departments of general surgery, orthopedic surgery, neuro-surgery, dental surgery, urology, and obstetrics & gynecology. In the new method(or method 1), each operation cost is categorized into three major expenses; personnel expense, material expense, and overhead expense and is allocated into the account of the clinical department that used the operating room. The method 1 shows that, among the total one-month operating cost of 814,054 thousand wons in this hospital, 163,714 thousand won is allocated to GS, 335,084 thousand won to as, 202,772 thousand won to NS, 42,265 thousand won to uno, 33,423 thousand won to OB/GY, and 36.796 thousand won to DS. The allocation of the operating cost to six departments by the new method is quite different from that by the conventional method. According to one conventional allocation method based on the ratio of the number of operations of a department to the total number of operations in the operating room(method 2 hereafter), 329,692 thousand won are allocated to GS, 262,125 thousand won to as, 87,104 thousand won to NS, 59,426 thousand won to URO, 51.285 thousand won to OB/GY, and 24,422 thousand won to DS. According to the other conventional allocation method based on the ratio of the revenue of a department(method 3 hereafter), 148,158 thousand won are allocated to GS, 272,708 thousand won to as, 268.638 thousand won to NS, 45,587 thousand won to uno, 51.285 thousand won to OB/GY, and 27.678 thousand won to DS. As can be noted from these results, the cost allocation to six departments by method 1 is strikingly different from those by method 2 and method 3. The operating cost allocated to GS by method 2 is about twice by method 1. Method 3 makes allocations of the operating cost to individual departments very similarly as method 1. However, there are still discrepancies between the two methods. In particular the cost allocations to OB/GY by the two methods have roughly 53.4% discrepancy. The conventional methods 2 and 3 fail to take into account properly the fact that the average time spent for the operation is different and dependent on the clinical department, whether or not to use expensive clinical material dictate the operating cost, and there is difference between the official operating cost and the actual operating cost. This is why the conventional methods turn out to be inappropriate as the operating cost allocation methods. In conclusion, the new method here may be laborious and cause a complexity in bookkeeping because it requires detailed bookkeeping of the operation cost by its constituent expenses and also by individual clinical department, treating each department as an independent accounting unit. But the method is worth adopting because it will allow the concerned hospital to estimate the operating cost as accurately as practicable. The cost data used in this study such as personnel expense, material cost, overhead cost may not be correct ones. Therefore, the operating cost estimated in the main text may not be the same as the actual cost. Also, the study is focused on the case of only hospital A, which is hardly claimed to represent the hospitals across the nation. In spite of these deficiencies, this study is noteworthy from the standpoint that it proposes a practical allocation method of the operating cost to each individual clinical department.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
• /
• 제22권4호
• /
• pp.779-795
• /
• 2002

Internet, a world wide network of computers, is considered as a sea of information because it allows people to share information beyond the barriors of time and space. However, in spite of the unmeasurable potential applications of the internet, its use in the field of biology education has been extremely limited mainly due to the scarcity of good biology-related sites. In order to provide useful guidelines for constructing user-friendly study sites, which can help high school students with different intellectual levels to study biology, comparative studies were performed on selected educational sites. Initially, hundreds of related sites were examined, and, subsequently, four distinct sites were selected not only because they are well organized, but also because each is unique in its contents. Also, a survey was carried out against the users of each site. The survey results indicated that the high school students regard the web-based biology study tools as effective teaching methods although there might be some bias in criteria for selecting target sites. In addition to the detailed biology topics and the related biology informations, multimedia data including pictures, animations and movies are found to be one of the important ingredients for desirable biology study sites. Thus, the inclusion of multimedia components should also be considered when developing a systematic biology study site. Overall, the role of the cyber space is expected to become more and more important. Since the development of the user-satisfied and self-guided sites require interdisciplinary collaborational efforts which should be made to promote extensive communication among teachers, education professionals, and computer engineers. Furthermore, the introduction of good biology study sites to the students by their teachers is also important factor for the successful web-based education.

• Journal of Korean Society of Transportation
• /
• 제35권4호
• /
• pp.360-373
• /
• 2017

The BTO-a projects is the types, which has a demand risk among the type of PPP projects in Korea. When demand risk is realized, private investor encounters financial difficulties due to lower revenue than its expectation and the government may also have a problem in stable infrastructure operation. In this regards, the government has applied various risk sharing policies in response to demand risk. However, the amount of government's risk sharing is the government's contingent liabilities as a result of demand uncertainty, and it fails to be quantified by the conventional NPV method of expressing in the text of the concession agreement. The purpose of this study is to estimate the value of investment risk sharing by the government considering the demand risk in the profit sharing system (BTO-a) introduced in 2015 as one of the demand risk sharing policy. The investment risk sharing will take the form of options in finance. Private investors have the right to claim subsidies from the government when their revenue declines, while the government has the obligation to pay subsidies under certain conditions. In this study, we have established a methodology for estimating the value of investment risk sharing by using the Black - Scholes option pricing model and examined the appropriateness of the results through case studies. As a result of the analysis, the value of investment risk sharing is estimated to be 12 billion won, which is about 4% of the investment cost of the private investment. In other words, it can be seen that the government will invest 12 billion won in financial support by sharing the investment risk. The option value when assuming the traffic volume risk as a random variable from the case studies is derived as an average of 12.2 billion won and a standard deviation of 3.67 billion won. As a result of the cumulative distribution, the option value of the 90% probability interval will be determined within the range of 6.9 to 18.8 billion won. The method proposed in this study is expected to help government and private investors understand the better risk analysis and economic value of better for investment risk sharing under the uncertainty of future demand.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
• /
• 제49권6호
• /
• pp.897-916
• /
• 2014

There is a considerable community between Eight Constitution Medicine and disease ecology in that they examine the relationship between humans and environment in terms of genetic, environmental and cultural factors, in addition to the factor of germs. In this respect, the purpose of this research aims to investigate the community between Eight Constitution Medicine, a branch of Eastern Medicine and disease ecology in geography. The research method is to analyse the clinical results from 647 patients and the data from a field survey on the Yeonggwang-gun County, Jeollanam-do Province. The results are summarized as the following: First, geographical distribution of patients varies depending on the type of physical constitution; it is also divided into two types, an oceanic type and an inland type. Second, it is highly probable that there is a significant relation between a vulnerable disease in association with a type of physical constitution and patient's native place; there are diseases that are not associated with all the patients who have the same constitution; they might be incurred by the eating or life habits in association with the characteristics of geographical environment. Third, the case study of Yeonggwang-gun County, Jeollanam-do Province, with a focus on the mutual relationship among the three factors. shows that patients, who share in common the eating or life habits that coincide with their own personal types of constitution, maintain a good health condition; if not, they tend to be exposed to a various kinds of disease. Because the study on the community between Eight Constitution Medicine and disease ecology is now at the early stage, diverse types of approaches should be tried to be applied in the future.

• Information Systems Review
• /
• 제11권1호
• /
• pp.161-179
• /
• 2009

Nowadays an increasing number of Internet users are running individual websites as Blog or Cyworld. As this type of personal media has a great influence on communication among people, business comes to care about Network Effect, Network Software, and Social Network. For instance, Cyworld created the web service called 'Minihompy' for individual web-logs, and acquired 2.4milion users in 2007. Although many people assumed that the popularity of Minihompy, or Blog would be a passing fad, Cyworld has improved its service, and expanded its Network with various contents. This kind of expansion reflects survival efforts from infinite competitions among ISPs (Internet Service Provider) with focus on enhancing usability to users. However, Cyworld's Network Effect is gradually diminished in these days. Both of low production cost of service vendors and the low searching/conversing costs of users combine to make ISPs hard to keep their market share sustainable. To overcome this lackluster trend, Cyworld has adopted new strategies and try to lock their users in their service. Various efforts to improve the continuance and expansion of Network effect remain unclear and uncertain. If we understand beforehand how a service would improve Network effect, and which service could bring more effect, ISPs can get substantial help in launching their new business strategy. Regardless many diverse ideas to increase their user's duration online ISPs cannot guarantee 'how the new service strategies will end up in profitability. Therefore, this research studies about Network effect of Cyworld's 'Minihompy' using System-Dynamics method which could analyze dynamic relation between users and ISPs. Furthermore, the research aims to predict changes of Network Effect based on the strategy of new service. 'Page View' and 'Duration Time' can be enhanced for the short tenn because they enhance the service functionality. However, these services cannot increase the Network in the long-run. Limitations of this research include that we predict the future merely based on the limited data. We also limit the independent variables over Network Effect only to the following two issues: Increasing the number of users and increasing the Service Functionality. Despite of some limitations, this study perhaps gives some insights to the policy makers or others facing the stiff competition in the network business.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Food Science and Nutrition
• /
• 제45권6호
• /
• pp.894-902
• /
• 2016

The purpose of this study was to analyze the attributes considered as important by parents in the selection of laver for infants through conjoint analysis techniques. A total of 917 questionnaires were distributed in January 2016, of which 211 were completed (23.0%). Statistical data analyses were performed using SPSS/Win 21.0 for descriptive statistics and conjoint analysis. The conjoint design was applied to evaluate the hypothetical laver for infants. According to the analysis of attributes and levels of laver for infants, the relative importance of each attribute was follows: seasoning (26.55%), flavor (19.33%), texture (18.75%), oil (15.15%), size (10.61%), and certification (9.61%). The results of the conjoint analysis indicate that parents raising infants preferred laver with the characteristics of non-seasoning, general flavor, softness, half-size, organic certification, and perilla oil. The most preferred laver for infants gained a 53.7% potential market share from choice simulation compared with laver being sold. Using utility and relative importance, the laver market for infants was classified into two segments. As a result of market segmentation, parents of cluster 1 preferred the laver model being sold (soy seasoning) while parents of cluster 2 preferred the optimized laver model (non-seasoning).

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
• /
• 제2권9호
• /
• pp.595-602
• /
• 2013

WiFi fingerprinting is well known as an effective localization technique used for indoor environments. However, this technique requires a large amount of pre-built fingerprint maps over the entire space. Moreover, due to environmental changes, these maps have to be newly built or updated periodically by experts. As a way to avoid this problem, crowd-sourced fingerprint mapping attracts many interests from researchers. This approach supports many volunteer users to share their WiFi fingerprints collected at a specific environment. Therefore, crowd-sourced fingerprinting can automatically update fingerprint maps up-to-date. In most previous systems, however, individual users were asked to enter their positions manually to build their local fingerprint maps. Moreover, the systems do not have any principled mechanism to keep fingerprint maps clean by detecting and filtering out erroneous fingerprints collected from multiple users. In this paper, we present the design of a crowd-sourced fingerprint mapping and localization(CMAL) system. The proposed system can not only automatically build and/or update WiFi fingerprint maps from fingerprint collections provided by multiple smartphone users, but also simultaneously track their positions using the up-to-date maps. The CMAL system consists of multiple clients to work on individual smartphones to collect fingerprints and a central server to maintain a database of fingerprint maps. Each client contains a particle filter-based WiFi SLAM engine, tracking the smartphone user's position and building each local fingerprint map. The server of our system adopts a Gaussian interpolation-based error filtering algorithm to maintain the integrity of fingerprint maps. Through various experiments, we show the high performance of our system.

• Journal of Korean Society of Transportation
• /
• 제24권2호
• /
• pp.65-78
• /
• 2006

This paper investigates the cost structure ot the Korea and Japan railroad industry with respect to density, scale and scope economies as well as productivity growth rate using a generalized trans)og multiproduct cost function model. The paper then assumes that the Korea and Japan railway companies pi·educe three outputs (incumbent railway passenger-kilometers. Shinkansen passenger-kilometers, ton-kilometers of freight) using four input factors (labor, fuel, maintenance, rolling stock and capital). The specified cost function includes foul other independent variables: track lengths to reflect network effects, two dummies to reflect nation and ownership effects, and time trend as a proxy for technical change. The simultaneous equation system consisting of a cost function and three input share equations is estimated with the Zellner's iterative seemingly unrelated regression. The unbalanced panel data used in the paper, a total of 154 observations. are collected from the annual records of the Korea National Railroad (KNR) for the yews $1977{\sim}2003$, Japan National Railways (JNR) for the years $1977{\sim}1984$. seven Japan Railways (JR's) for the years $1987{\sim}2003$. The findings show that the Korean and Japanese railways exhibit product-specific and overall economies of density but product-specific diseconomies of scale with respect to incumbent railway passenger-kilometers, Shinkansen-kilometers and ton-kilometers. However, the railways experience mild overall economies of scale which result from economies of scope associated with the joint production of incumbent railway/Shinkansen and feight, freight/incumbent railway and Shinkansen except Shinkansen/incumbent railway and freight. In addition, the economies of density and scale in the KNR, JR east, JR central, and JR west companies at the point of the years $1990{\sim}2003$ average is generally analogous to the above results at the point of sample average. There also appear to be economies of ssope associated with the joint Production of the incumbent railway and Shinkansen in JR central but diseconomies of scope in JR East and JR West. The findings also indicate that the productivity growth rate of the privately-owned JR's is larger than that of the government-owned KNR.

• Journal of the Korean association of regional geographers
• /
• 제3권2호
• /
• pp.121-150
• /
• 1997

This Study puts the purpose to explicate the regionalities of land-lease farming by a comparative analisis of the five case study areas in Kungpook Province as the agricultural space system of Teagu metropolitan city. For the regional comparative analysis the province was divided into the three zones with the distance from the central city(Teagu): urban fringes, intermediate and remote zone, and then subdivided into the five regions by farming systems : horticulture, rice-farming, and dry-field farming. The data were collected from 77 land-leasing farmers by questionnaire and interview with farm managers in 5 sample villages representing the regionalities of the above five regions respectively. In spite of relatively restricted scope of the research areas, the analytical results appear remarkable regional differences in the characteristics of land-lease farming within a single agricultural space system. In the final analysis the regionalities of the five land-lease farming regions could be described respectively as follows. (1) Koryong-Gun in the inner urban fringe zone : The developing land-lease farming region of commercialized suburban horticulture with medium scale. (2) Songju-Gun in the outer urban fringe zone : The developing land-lease farming region of highly commercialized horticulture with large scale. (3) Uisong-Gun in the intermediate zone : The stagnated land-lease farming region of commercialized rice-farming with large scale. (4) Yongil-Gun in the intermediate zone : The stagnated land-lease farming region of commercializing dry-field farming with medium scale. (5) Ponghwa-Gun in the remote zone : The stagnated and delayed region in commercializing of intermountain dry-field land-lease farming with small scale. These varied regionalities resulted from the diverse spatiality as a complex of spatial orders and localities. The spatial orders in this study are frequently recognizable as a form of distance-decay, and the locality of a region is determined mostly by the its peculiarity of physical and population conditions. In the comparative analysis of the regionalities the degree of commercialization of a region is a most comprehensive and useful frame of reference because it reflects the degree of development of capitalist land-lease farming. Finally these apparent regional differentiations of land-lease farming within a agricultural space system raise the problem of impracticality of the existing uniform logic on the land-lease farming such as "large scale farms share larger part of leased farmland." This problem suggests the urgent need of reappraisal of many aspatial logics and theories on the land-lease farming.

• Korea Journal of Hospital Management
• /
• 제11권1호
• /
• pp.1-30
• /
• 2006

According to the available data, in these days, the number of medical accidents and disputes have significantly increased since 1990 in Korea. From this aspect, a variety of approaches and efforts to solve these problems is needed before it is too late. This study intended to identify the thoughts of patients who are directly connected with medical accidents and disputes and then to consider reasonable settlement methods of the increasing disputes. For achieving the purpose of this study, the self-administerd questionnaire was conducted with 450 out-patients who visited three university hospitals, five small and medium-sized hospitals, and ten clinics in Seoul from June 13 to 17, 2005. Incomplete questionnaires were omitted and 410 respondents(91%) were included for the analysis of this study. Each section of the survey was composed of six categories such as the recognition of malpractice, a compensation system about no-fault medical accidents, the recognition of the judgement of medical accidents in court, reasonable settlement of medical accidents, reasons of lawsuit, and the need of the medical dispute settlement organization. The major results of this study were as follows. First, more than half of the respondents, 51.9 percent, worry about malpractice. And many respondents think malpractice causes their symptoms to persist or become worse, and also some respondents think that the doctor's prescription changed too frequently. Second, as for a compensation system about no-fault medical accident, 55.7 percent of the respondents insist that a proper compensation for suffering patients or their families should be provided. And also as for the responsibility of compensation, respondents think joint compensation of both the medical institution and the government is needed foremost, followed by the medical insurance company and finally by the medical institution. The government as well as the related institutions should take responsibility for malpractice accidents for which the doctor is not responsible. Third, as for the acknowledgment of medical accident judgements by the court, 32.8 percent of respondents think that it is best to compromise with a medical institution, followed by lawsuit(26.2%), the assistance of civil organization(23.2%), and a powerful physical protest(7.6%). Fourth, as for the lawsuit of medical accidents, 62.9 percent of respondents think that patients and their families would be in a disadvantageous position in relation to medical institutions and doctors mentioning the lack of professional medical and lawful knowledge, experience and know-how as the reason. So many people have given up appeals owing to the difficulties involved in defending themselves through evidence. Fifth, about a half share of the respondents indicated that the medical institution's neglect of the responsibility of medical accidents is one of the most important reasons of lawsuit. And next respondents mentioned the lack of the medical dispute settlement organization and a general distrust of medical institutions and doctors. Sixth, a majority of respondents consented to the introduction of the need of the medical dispute settlement organization, And about a half of the respondents mentioned a readiness to accept the mediation of the organization, but the rest did not express a clear opinion. It seems that conflict among the parties concerned have existed in relation to the medical dispute settlement organization and related legislation for many years. But as this study has shown, the needs of the medical dispute settlement organization is in desperate demand. Therefore, more negotiation efforts from all interest groups should be considered for the birth of the medical dispute settlement organization and related legislation.