• Journal of Korean Academy of Fundamentals of Nursing
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.392-402
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• 2014

Purpose: This study was done to investigate the status of disinfection and sterilization in healthcare facilities. Method: A survey of 193 Korean healthcare facilities was conducted from February 8 to March 7, 2013. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, ${\chi}^2$ test, Fisher's exact test, one-way ANOVA, Scheffe with SPSS WIN 18.0. Results: Of the healthcare facilities 93.2% had specific guidelines for disinfection/sterilization, but only 47.9% had a committee on disinfection/sterilization for decision-making, less than half (42.7%) conducted regular monitoring of actual practices, while 83.9% had established procedures for recovery in case of problems with the disinfection process and 89.0% kept records and archives of disinfection practices. Cleaning process, selection of chemical disinfectants and process of disinfection and sterilization were found to be inadequate in some healthcare facilities. Perception score for adequacy of medical instruments was 8.10, environmental disinfection was 7.20, and sterilizer management was 8.45 out of a possible 10. Conclusion: Compared to larger institutions, smaller healthcare facilities had less effective disinfection and sterilization management systems, while some facilities showed inadequate practices for medical equipment and general sterilization. Better academic and state-level support is recommended for smaller facilities in order to establish a better system-wide management system.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.36 no.3B
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• pp.275-286
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• 2011

As the 21st century paradigm of healthcare service changes from post-therapeutic treatment to disease prevention and management in advance, the M2M-based u-healthcare application service is increasingly important. M2M-based u-healthcare application service uses mobile handsets equipped with sensors to measure vital information, and the medical staff in remote locations can manage the health of the patient or the public in real time. In this paper, IEEE/HL7 translation gateway, utilizing the gateway based on M2M u-healthcare application service structure, which is based on international standards, has been designed and implemented. Specifically, the gateway between ISO/IEEE 11073 standards and ANSI HL7 has been developed. The former defines the protocol for the exchange of information between the agent device and the manger devices for measuring and handling biological signal, and the latter defines the application layer protocol for the exchange of various healthcare information systems. Finally, in order to demonstrate the functionality of the proposed architecture, the M2M-based U-healthcare application service based on IEEE/HL7 translation gateway, utilizing the gateway, has been developed which can measure, collect and process a variety of vital signs such as ECG or SpO2.

• Progress in Medical Physics
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.139-145
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• 2016

With the development in field of industry and medicine, new machines and techniques are being launched. Moreover, the complexity of the techniques is associated to an increasing risk of incident. Especially, a small error in radiotherapy can lead to a serious patient-related incident, risk management is necessary in radiotherapy in order to reduce the risk of incident. However, in field of radiotherapy, there are no legally binding clauses for risk management and there is an absence of risk management systems at an institutional level. Therefore, we analyzed institutional status of risk management, reporting & classification systems, and risk assessment & analysis in 31 countries. For risk management and reporting systems, 65% of countries investigated had legislation or regulations; however, only 35% of countries used classification systems. It was found that 43% more countries had legislation for risk management in healthcare than those for radiotherapy; 19% more countries had reporting systems for healthcare than those for radiotherapy. For classification systems, 60% more countries had legislation, recommendation, and guidelines in the field of radiotherapy than those for healthcare. Recently, international institutes have published several reports for risk management and patient safety in radiotherapy, owing to which, countries adopting risk management for radiotherapy will gradually increase. Before adopting risk management in Korea, we should precisely understand the procedures and functions of risk management, in order to increase efficiency of risk management because classification & reporting system and risk assessment & analysis are connected organically, and institutional management is needed for high quality of risk management in Korea.

• The Korean Journal of Pain
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.99-107
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• 2020

Chronic severe pain results in a detrimental effect on the patient's quality of life. Such patients have to take a large number of medications, including opioids, often without satisfactory effect, sometimes leading to medication abuse and the pain worsening. Spinal cord stimulation (SCS) is one of the most effective technologies that, unlike other interventional pain treatment methods, achieves long-term results in patients suffering from chronic neuropathic pain. The first described mode of SCS was a conventional tonic stimulation, but now the novel modalities (high-frequency and burst), techniques (dorsal root ganglia stimulations), and technical development (wireless and implantable pulse generator-free systems) of SCS are becoming more popular. The improvement of SCS systems, their miniaturization, and the appearance of new mechanisms for anchoring electrodes results in a significant reduction in the rate of complications and revision surgeries, and the appearance of new waves of stimulation allows not only to avoid the phenomenon of addiction, but also to improve the long-term results of chronic SCS. The purpose of this review is to describe the current condition of SCS and up-to-date technical advances.

• Journal of radiological science and technology
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.1-10
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• 2008

Ubiquitous health care system, which is one of the developing solution technologies of IT, BT and NT, could give us new medical environments in future. Implementing health information systems can be complex, expensive and frustrating. Healthcare professionals seeking to acquire or upgrade systems do not have a convenient, reliable way of specifying a level of adherence to communication standards sufficient to achieve truly efficient interoperability. Great progress has been made in establishing such standards-DICOM, IHE and HL7, notably, are now highly advanced. IHE has defined a common framework to deliver the basic interoperability needed for local and regional health information networks. It has developed a foundational set of standards-based integration profiles for information exchange with three interrelated efforts. HL7 is one of several ANSI-accredited Standards Developing Organizations operating in the healthcare arena. Most SDOs produce standards (protocols) for a particular healthcare domain such as pharmacy, medical devices, imaging or insurance transactions. HL7's domain is clinical and administrative data. HL7 is an international community of healthcare subject matter experts and information scientists collaborating to create standards for the exchange, management and integration of electronic healthcare information. The ASTM specification for Continuity of Care Record was developed by subcommittee E31.28 on electronic health records, which includes clinicians, provider institutions, administrators, patient advocates, vendors, and health industry. In this paper, there are suggestions that provide a test bed, demonstration and specification of how standards such a IHE, HL7, ASTM can be used to provide an integrated environment.

• Journal of Industrial Convergence
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.109-116
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• 2020

The purpose of this study is to make suggestions for the infectious disease surveillance systems as part of the government's healthcare policy intended to minimize damage by implementing an appropriate and swift crisis management in the event of future infectious disease outbreaks. To that end, this descriptive study analyzes the infectious disease outbreaks and the management and control thereof in Korea and other countries, so as to suggest some approaches to infectious disease surveillance systems applicable to affected regions. The analysis results shed light on the causes of the spread of future infectious diseases over the past years, and the management systems that could possibly deal with the trial and error in the response policy. It seems crucial to roll out appropriate information, training and promotion programs as part of the national disaster response systems to prevent infectious diseases in relation to the roles of multiple relevant government agencies in the event of disasters especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Communication Sciences Conference
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• 2006.07a
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• pp.375-375
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• 2006

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.7 no.5
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• pp.967-979
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• 2013

Now a day, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are being widely used in different areas one of which is healthcare services. A wireless medical sensor network senses patient's vital physiological signs through medical sensor-nodes deployed on patient's body area; and transmits these signals to devices of registered medical professionals. These sensor-nodes have low computational power and limited storage capacity. Moreover, the wireless nature of technology attracts malicious minds. Thus, proper user authentication is a prime concern before granting access to patient's sensitive and private data. Recently, P. Kumar et al. claimed to propose a strong authentication protocol for healthcare using Wireless Medical Sensor Networks (WMSN). However, we find that P. Kumar et al.'s scheme is flawed with a number of security pitfalls. Information stored inside smart card, if extracted, is enough to deceive a valid user. Adversary can not only access patient's physiological data on behalf of a valid user without knowing actual password, can also send fake/irrelevant information about patient by playing role of medical sensor-node. Besides, adversary can guess a user's password and is able to compute the session key shared between user and medical sensor-nodes. Thus, the scheme looses message confidentiality. Additionally, the scheme fails to resist insider attack and lacks user anonymity.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.221-237
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• 2016

The wireless body area networks (WBANs) consist of wearable computing devices and can support various healthcare-related applications. There exist two crucial issues when WBANs are utilized for healthcare applications. One is the protection of the sensitive biometric data transmitted over the insecure wireless channels. The other is the design of effective medical management mechanisms. In this paper, a secure medical information management system is proposed and implemented on a TinyOS-based WBAN test bed to simultaneously address these two issues. In this system, the electronic medical record (EMR) is bound to the biometric data with a novel fragile zero-watermarking scheme based on the modified visual secret sharing (MVSS). In this manner, the EMR can be utilized not only for medical management but also for data integrity checking. Additionally, both the biometric data and the EMR are encrypted, and the EMR is further protected by the MVSS. Our analysis and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system not only protects the confidentialities of both the biometric data and the EMR but also offers reliable patient information authentication, explicit healthcare operation verification and undeniable doctor liability identification for WBANs.

• Journal of Computing Science and Engineering
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.269-281
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• 2011

STEPSTONE is a joint industry-university project to create open source technology that would enable the scalable, "friction-free" integration of device-based healthcare solutions into enterprise systems using a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Specifically, STEPSTONE defines a first proposal to a Service Oriented Device Architecture (SODA) framework, and provides for initial reference implementations. STEPSTONE also intends to encourage a broad community effort to further develop the framework and its implementations. In this paper, we present SODA, along with two implementation proposals of SODA's device integration. We demonstrate the ease by which SODA was used to develop an end-to-end personal healthcare monitoring system. We also demonstrate the ease by which the STEPSTONE system was extended by other participants - Washington State University - to include additional devices and end user interfaces. We show clearly how SODA and therefore SODA devices make integration almost automatic, replicable, and scalable. This allows telehealth system developers to focus their energy and attention on the system functionality and other important issues, such as usability, privacy, persuasion and outcome assessment studies.