• Health Policy and Management
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.703-710
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• 2012

Purpose : The aim of this study is to review the current status of healthcare provision and its human resources administrative management and propose a coordinated human resource management plan for the more efficient operations of healthcare organizations. Methods : We reviewed the literature and held discussions with officials from the United States Department of Health and Human Services to survey United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps operations. In addition, we surveyed the literature to analyze the current structure and responsibilities of governing bodies involved in public healthcare in Korea. Results : In Korea, there are several administrative offices involved in public health: the Ministry of Health and Welfare, the Ministry of Defense, the Environment Ministry and others. Since these diverse agencies don't integrate their operations, it is difficult to grasp their management of both public healthcare services and their personnel. A potential model is the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, a sub-group of the Department of Health and Human Services and an elite team of highly qualified, public health professionals, which coordinates and manages the overall work and personnel of diverse healthcare organizations. Conclusion : We suggest the establishment of a federal level, public health administrative department of human resource management to centralize and coordinate the existing, disparate healthcare administrative agencies.

• Journal of The Korea Institute of Healthcare Architecture
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.37-44
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• 2023

Purpose: To decrease cross-infection, it's essential to analyze the spatial composition of the 'PPE doffing area'. Instead of solely relying on manpower standards, we should focus on responding to infectious diseases within the context of space planning. By doing so, we can lower the risk for healthcare workers' infection and ensure a level of safety in various environmental changes or new manpower input situations. Methods: This analysis is conducted specifically for facilities with negative pressure isolation wards. Additionally, interview surveys to obtain feedback from healthcare workers and incorporate their expertise into the design of the 'PPE doffing area' have been carried. Results: In a PPE doffing area, the standard spaces include a PPE doffing room, a shower room, and a clothing room. Depending on the facility environment or the level of infectious diseases, a Decontamination room or Anteroom can be optionally added. Healthcare workers who remove their PPE in the PPE doffing room should avoid re-entering the Negative pressure room. The shower room is often underutilized. When planning for a future PPE doffing area, an aisle space or passageway must be included even if a shower room is planned. Implications: This study examined the space used by healthcare workers rather than patients, with a focus on infection prevention through architectural planning rather than individual efforts. However, the investigation was limited to facilities that have been converted from general wards to negative pressure isolation wards, so it cannot be generalized to all infectious disease facilities.

• Safety and Health at Work
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.415-420
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• 2022

Background: Healthcare workers perform an emotionally exhausting daily work activity, making them prone to occupational hazards, namely psychosocial ones. This study aims to assess the impact of psychosocial risk factors on healthcare workers' mental health. Methods: A cross-sectional study was developed between May and June of 2021 with 479 healthcare workers from Portuguese hospitals. The Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale was used to assess mental health, and psychosocial risks were assessed through the Health and Work Survey - INSAT. Statistical analysis was performed to identify the psychosocial risk factors related to anxiety, depression, and stress. Subsequently, a multiple linear regression was performed to identify the models that better explained psychosocial risk factors' relationship with anxiety, depression, and stress. Results: Data showed a strong exposure to psychosocial risks. Work pace and intensity, work relationships, and emotional demands stood out with higher global average percentages for yes answers to "exposure and discomfort." The analysis of the b values and p-values from the multiple linear regression shows that some cross-sectional psychosocial risks are predictors of anxiety and stress dimensions, and other psychosocial risks differ in the two mental health dimensions. However, it is important to highlight that healthcare workers still showed great joy and pleasure in performing their work activities. Conclusion: Support network development in the work environment is needed to prevent healthcare workers' emotional stress and promote their psychological well-being. Therefore, new research is essential to understand the psychosocial risks that affect healthcare workers and assess the less visible effects of work-health relationships.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.24 no.8
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• pp.32-42
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• 2024

The Internet of Things (IoT) is set to transform patient care by enhancing data collection, analysis, and management through medical sensors and wearable devices. However, the convergence of IoT device vulnerabilities and the sensitivity of healthcare data raises significant data integrity and privacy concerns. In response, this research introduces the Smart-Coord system, a practical and affordable solution for securing healthcare IoT. Smart-Coord leverages blockchain technology and coordinate-based access management to fortify healthcare IoT. It employs IPFS for immutable data storage and intelligent Solidity Ethereum contracts for data integrity and confidentiality, creating a hierarchical, AES-CBC-secured data transmission protocol from IoT devices to blockchain repositories. Our technique uses a unique coordinate system to embed confidentiality and integrity regulations into a single access control model, dictating data access and transfer based on subject-object pairings in a coordinate plane. This dual enforcement technique governs and secures the flow of healthcare IoT information. With its implementation on the Matic network, the Smart-Coord system's computational efficiency and cost-effectiveness are unparalleled. Smart-Coord boasts significantly lower transaction costs and data operation processing times than other blockchain networks, making it a practical and affordable solution. Smart-Coord holds the promise of enhancing IoT-based healthcare system security by managing sensitive health data in a scalable, efficient, and secure manner. The Smart-Coord framework heralds a new era in healthcare IoT adoption, expertly managing data integrity, confidentiality, and accessibility to ensure a secure, reliable digital environment for patient data management.

• Journal of Korean Society for Quality Management
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• v.51 no.4
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• pp.531-550
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• 2023

Purpose: The unique nature of life-and-death healthcare services sets them apart from other service industries. While many studies exist on the relationship between healthcare services and customer satisfaction, most of them focus on mildly ill patients, ignoring the differences between critically ill and non-seriously ill patients. This study discusses the actual quality of healthcare services for patients who are facing life-threatening illnesses and are on life support, as well as their right to protection and dignity. Methods: The survey conducted to 149 patients with the four major illnesses: cancer, heart disease, brain disease and rare and incurable disease, those who have experiences with senior general hospitals. Results: The basic statistics of this study are adequate to represent the four major critical illnesses, and the reliability and validity of this study's hypotheses, which were measured by multiple items, were analyzed, and the internal consistency was judged to be high. In addition, it was found that the convergent validity was good and the discriminant validity was also secured. When examining the goodness of fit of the hypotheses, the SRMR, which is the standardized root mean square of residuals that measures the difference between the covariance matrix of the data variables and the theoretical covariance matrix structure of the model, met the optimal criteria. Conclusion: The academic implications of this study are differentiated from other studies by moving away from evaluating the quality of healthcare services for mildly ill patients and focusing on the rights and dignity of patients with life-threatening illnesses in four senior general hospitals. In terms of academic implications, this study enriches the depth of related studies by demonstrating the right to protection and dignity as a factor of patient-centeredness based on physical environment quality, interaction quality, and outcome quality, which are presented as sub-factors of healthcare quality. We found that the three quality factors classified by Brady and Cronin (2001) are optimized for healthcare quality assessment and management, and that the results of patients' interaction quality assessment can be used to provide a comprehensive quality rating for hospitals. Health and human rights are inextricably linked, so assessing the degree to which rights and dignity are protected can be a superior and more comprehensive measurement tool than traditional health level measures for healthcare organizations. Practical implications: Improving the quality of the physical environment and the quality of outcomes is an important challenge for hospital managers who attract patients with life and death conditions, but given the scale and economics of time, money, and human inputs, improving the quality of interactions and defining them as performance indicators in hospital quality management is an efficient way to create maximum value in the short term.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.13 no.11
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• pp.5442-5446
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• 2012

A u-healthcare remote diagnosis system is proposed for chronic disease and medical vulnerable groups check the health systematically and support for the most optimal environment to improve the quality of life. The u-healthcare remote diagnosis system using wireless measure the thoracic sound in the chest. And this is demonstrated that the system using radio frequency is not be affected by the electromagnetic wave with the use of an experiment and by confirming that this u-healthcare remote diagnosis system can not affect the doctors and the patients.

• Journal of The Korea Institute of Healthcare Architecture
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.45-52
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• 2011

The visual sensory information in physical environments can induce or reduce occupants' stress. In healthcare settings, positive environmental stimulations can promote patient well-being by reducing their stress: poor health environments work against a patient's health. Changing the color in a patient room is an inexpensive process and thus finding better colors for healthcare settings is a cost effective method of improving healing environments. Color may have important implications for pediatric patients, but the investigation of Korean populations has been non-existent. The purpose of this study was to investigate Korean pediatric patients' color preferences for patient room design. The color preferences from 50 Korean pediatric patients were recorded and investigated for gender effects. A simulation method was used because of its reliability and feasibility, allowing for investigating the value of color in real contexts and controlling confounding variables. The overall color preferences from Korean pediatric patients showed that they preferred blue the most and white the least. Gender differences were found in red and purple. Girls preferred red and purple more than boys. The results from this study can help healthcare providers and designers better understand appropriate colors for Korean pediatric patient populations.

• International journal of advanced smart convergence
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.32-39
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• 2016

With the help of a small wearable device, patients reside in an isolated village need constant monitoring which may increase access to care and decrease healthcare delivery cost. As the number of patients' requests increases in simultaneously manner, the web service gateway located in the village hall encounters limitations for performing them successfully and concurrently. The gateway based RESTful technology responsible for handling patients' requests attests an internet latency in case a large number of them submit toward the gateway increases. In this paper, we propose the design tasks of the web service gateway for handling concurrency events. In the procedure of designing tasks, concurrency is best understood by employing multiple levels of abstraction. The way that is eminently to accomplish concurrency is to build an object-oriented environment with support for messages passing between concurrent objects. We also investigate the performance of event-driven architecture for building web service gateway using node.js. The experiments results show that server-side JavaScript with Node.js and MongoDB as database is 40% faster than Apache Sling. With Node.js developers can build a high-performance, asynchronous, event-driven healthcare hub server to handle an increasing number of concurrent connections for Remote Healthcare Monitoring System in an isolated village with no access to local medical care.

• Journal of Home Health Care Nursing
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.198-209
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• 2020

Purpose: This study sought to develop a scale to evaluate patient-centered healthcare services at hospitals and verify its reliability and validity. Methods: We conducted a literature review and interviewed medical personnel and practitioners in medical institutions. We also conducted a content validation and preliminary survey of experts, including 40 preliminary items. We conducted the main survey among 240 medical institution workers to assess the validity and reliability of the preliminary measurement tool. Results: The validity and reliability of the scale were assessed by 29 items underlying six factors: ease of communication, continuity and extension of the hospital's role, stable environment, emotional support, respect for patients' values, and offer of information. Cronbach's α of the whole tool was .91, while the value of each factor ranged from .82 to .74, thereby verifying its reliability. Conclusion: The patient-centered healthcare services scale was identified as a tool appropriate for healthcare professionals. This tool will be useful in a diverse range of research on the development of educational programs for patient-centered healthcare services and the promotion of patient-centered causes.

• Journal of Communications and Networks
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.160-166
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• 2011

In u-healthcare services based on wireless body sensor networks, reliable connection is very important as many types of information, including vital signals, are transmitted through the networks. The transmit power requirements are very stringent in the case of in-body networks for implant communication. Furthermore, the wireless link in an in-body environment has a high degree of path loss (e.g., the path loss exponent is around 6.2 for deep tissue). Because of such inherently bad settings of the communication nodes, a multi-hop network topology is preferred in order to meet the transmit power requirements and to increase the battery lifetime of sensor nodes. This will ensure that the live body of a patient receiving the healthcare service has a reduced level of specific absorption ratio (SAR) when exposed to long-lasting radiation. We propose an efficientmethod for delivering delay-intolerant data packets over multiple hops. We consider forward error correction (FEC) in an erasure correction mode and develop a mathematical formulation for packet-level scheduling of delay-intolerant FEC packets over multiple hops. The proposed method can be used as a simple guideline for applications to setting up a topology for a medical body sensor network of each individual patient, which is connected to a remote server for u-healthcare service applications.