• Korea Journal of Hospital Management
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.76-100
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• 2008

The purpose of this research is to identify causalities among service quality, service value, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty and to compare the causalities between in-patients and out-patients. A multi-group structural equation model was used to test the hypothesis of conceptual model. Empirical results indicate that two factors such as assurance and empathy have direct impact on service value and customer satisfaction in both the patients. In the results of multi-group comparison test, however, the path coefficients from service value to customer loyalty and from customer satisfaction to customer loyalty were different across the two groups. In out-patients, customer loyalty is more positively related with service value. In in-patients, customer loyalty is more positively related with customer satisfaction. It is proven that service quality influences customer loyalty. Therefore To compete successfully in today's volatile & competitive medical markets, the hospital needs to manage the service quality, considering the type of patients.

• Journal of agricultural medicine and community health
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• v.43 no.2
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• pp.74-84
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• 2018

Objectives: The purpose of this study is to compare the perceptions of the rural healthcare service improvement project' performance and reorganization of public health centers between project staffs and local residents. Methods: Data collection from this study was performed in 141 project areas using structured questionnaires. Data analysis was used in SPSS 22.0 version. Results: The public health center staffs were more positive about the items for improving health facilities than the local residents. Residents in the Si area generally perceived performance as more positive than residents in the Gun area, while public health center staffs in the Gun area perceived performance as more positive than public health center staffs in the Si area. Local residents expressed negative opinions about the reduction in the number of branches of public health clinics and health medical clinics. Conclusions: In conclusion, careful improvement projects for rural health care and the establishment of health care systems will be necessary, reflecting the opinions of local residents, along with a variety of regional characteristics.

• Research in Community and Public Health Nursing
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• v.31 no.2
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• pp.143-155
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• 2020

Purpose: This study aimed to explore the difficulties and coping that advanced practice nurses (APNs) experience in home health nursing field. Methods: The participants were 12 APNs who had experience in home health nursing for over 5 years. Data were collected through two focus group interviews between August and September, 2017. The results were analyzed using a qualitative content analysis. Results: Out of 10 sub-categories and 29 codes, 4 categories emerged: "crushed by the responsibilities as the only healthcare professional", "worn out by family who interfere with work", "anxiety about my safety being threatened" and "using self-learned know-hows". Conclusion: APNs face difficulties due to the environmental characteristics of the homes, the characteristics of chronically critically ill (CCI) patients and their families, and legal or systematical limitations when dealing with problems based on their personal competence. In order to ensure that professional nursing care is more readily provided to CCI patients through home health nursing services in local communities, it is imperative that support systems at the organizational and institutional levels be established in a systematic way to resolve the issues faced by APNs.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.1052-1070
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• 2016

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have received a lot of attention as a promising technology for medical and healthcare applications. A WBAN should guarantee energy efficiency, data reliability, and low data latency because it uses tiny sensors that have limited energy and deals with medical data that needs to be timely and correctly transferred. To satisfy this requirement, many multi-radio multi-channel MAC protocols have been proposed, but these cannot be implemented on current off-the-shelf sensor nodes because they do not support multi-radio transceivers. Thus, recently single-radio multi-channel MAC protocols have been proposed; however, these methods are energy inefficient due to data duplication. This paper proposes a TDMA-based single-radio, multi-channel MAC protocol that uses the Unbalanced Star+Mesh topology to satisfy the requirements of WBANs. Our analytical analysis together experiments using real sensor nodes show that the proposed protocol outperforms existing methods in terms of energy efficiency, reliability, and low data latency.

• Journal of Advanced Navigation Technology
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• v.23 no.6
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• pp.584-588
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• 2019

Wireless body area network (WBAN) is a networking technology that enables early detection of abnormal health conditions, real-time medical monitoring, and telemedicine support systems. The internet of things (IoT) for healthcare, which has become an issue recently, is one of the most promising areas for improving the quality of human life. It must meet the high QoS requirements of the medical communication system like any other communication system. Therefore, the bit error rate (BER) threshold was chosen to accommodate the QoS requirements of the WBAN communication system. In this paper, we calculated BER performance of WBAN channel using IR-UWB PPM modulation and analyzed link budget and system margin of WBAN according to various system parameters.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2013.05a
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• pp.677-680
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• 2013

The risk of leakage of personal information is growing with new services such as social networking and cloud services by the rapid development of information. In particular, the field of medical IT technology is required to solve problems arising from the aging society and sustainable economic development, and in accordance with the requirements to improve the quality of life, a new market for medical devices and healthcare services can be expected. However, most of the medical information system was computerized with the introduction of IT technology, and when they exchange and transfer of medical information between institutions, medical information leakage occurs and security risk is growing. In this paper we review and analyse the security of personal health information related to the major legal systems and technical and administrative protection.

• Asian Oncology Nursing
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.77-83
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• 2012

Purpose: This study was designed to describe outcomes of pain management, to identify pain intensity, pain management and barriers to pain management, and to test correlation among the variables in cancer patients who are registered in public health centers. Methods: By using a descriptive survey design, 3 instruments were used to collect data: the Numeric Rating Scale for pain, the Barriers Questionnaire-Korean version, and a one-item self-report tool about patient satisfaction. A sample of 190 patients with cancer was recruited from a public health center. Results: The mean rating for pain during the past 24 hours was mild and the mean score of barriers to pain management was 3.20. Patients were satisfied with pain management but they also had concerns it. A negative correlation was found among pain severity, pain relief and satisfaction of pain management. However, there was not significant correlation between the patient-related barriers to pain management and other variables. Conclusion: These results suggest that the intervention for cancer patients should focus not only on patient-related barriers to pain management, but also address health-care system related barriers.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.8 no.12
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• pp.4643-4660
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• 2014

Integrity authentication of biometric data in Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a critical issue because the sensitive data transmitted over broadcast wireless channels could be attacked easily. However, traditional cryptograph-based integrity authentication schemes are not suitable for WBAN as they consume much computational resource on the sensor nodes with limited memory, computational capability and power. To address this problem, a novel lightweight integrity authentication scheme based on reversible watermark is proposed for WBAN and implemented on a TinyOS-based WBAN test bed in this paper. In the proposed scheme, the data is divided into groups with a fixed size to improve grouping efficiency; the histogram shifting technique is adopted to avoid possible underflow or overflow; local maps are generated to restore the shifted data; and the watermarks are generated and embedded in a chaining way for integrity authentication. Our analytic and experimental results demonstrate that the integrity of biometric data can be reliably authenticated with low cost, and the data can be entirely recovered for healthcare applications by using our proposed scheme.

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.151-163
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• 2020

This study reviewed primary care purchasing issues of the Indonesian single-insurer, BPJS-K, in the context of triangular power relations between the government, the insurer, and the providers, and considered its challenges of purchasing as the national single-insurer. Some literature reviews and interviews with Indonesian stakeholders and residents were used to describe the historical and social contexts of Indonesian healthcare and social health insurance systems especially focusing legal and institutional status of BPJS-K and primary care provision and delivery conditions in remote areas. Though BPJS-K directly belongs to the presidential office of Indonesia, it has limited power in terms of purchasing as a single insurer. Mainly it was due to the lack of primary care resources, Ministry of Health's strong power as the regulator and provider, and BPJS-K's powerlessness against monitoring and quality of care assessment. Ambiguous accountability was another issue among the insurer and the Ministry of Health. This created confusions in primary care provision. It is suggested that each agencies' accountability should be obvious in terms of legal, political, and social contexts.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.7 no.8
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• pp.1805-1824
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• 2013

Recently, the use of wireless body area networks (WBAN) has been increasing rapidly in medical healthcare applications. WBANs consist of smart nodes that can be used to sense and transmit vital data such as heart rate, temperature and ECG from a human body to a medical centre. WBANs depend on limited resources such as energy and bandwidth. In order to utilise these resources efficiently, a very well organized medium access control (MAC) protocol must be considered. In this paper, a new, adaptive and energy-efficient MAC protocol, entitled isMAC, is proposed for WBANs. The proposed MAC is based on multi-channel communication and aims to prolong the network lifetime by effectively employing (i) a collision prevention mechanism, (ii) a coordinator node (WCN) selection algorithm and (iii) a transmission power adjustment approach. The isMAC protocol has been developed and modelled, by using OPNET Modeler simulation software. It is based on a networking scenario that requires especially high data rates such as ECG, for performance evaluation purposes. Packet delay, network throughput and energy consumption have been chosen as performance metrics. The comparison between the simulation results of isMAC and classical IEEE 802.15.4 (ZigBee) protocol shows that isMAC significantly outperforms IEEE 802.15.4 in terms of packet delay, throughput and energy consumption.