• Korean Medical Education Review
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.147-153
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• 2021

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic made it necessary for medical schools to restructure their curriculum by switching from face-to-face instruction to various forms of flexible learning. Flexible learning is a student-centered approach to learning that has received interest in many educational sectors. It is a critical strategy for expanding access to higher education during the pandemic. As flexible learning includes online, blended, hybrid, and hyflex learning options, learners have the opportunity to select an instruction modality based on their needs and interests. The shift to flexible learning in medical education took place rapidly in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and learners, instructors, and schools were not prepared for this instructional change. Through the lens of the technology acceptance model, human agency, and a social constructivist perspective, I examine students, instructors, and educational institutions' roles in successfully navigating the digital transformation era. The pandemic has also accelerated the use of advanced information and communication technologies, such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality, in learning. Through a review of the literature, this paper aimed to reflect on current flexible learning practices from the instructional design and educational technology perspective and explore emerging technologies that may be implemented in future medical education.

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.317-322
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• 2022

Background: Limited access to medical services causes problems in patients' health and life. Also, hospital closures cause concentration towards general hospitals, which leads to worsening National Health Insurance finance. Therefore, hospital closure is an important topic to be analyzed. Methods: This paper analyzed the factors that affect hospital closures using survival analysis with the data of 970 hospitals opened between 2010 and 2019 in Korea. The number of medical personnel, hospital rooms, sickbeds, and medical departments were used as explanatory variables. Results: The number of medical personnel and hospital rooms increased the survival probability while the number of sickbeds and medical departments decrease the survival probability. Conclusion: The results suggest that hospitals have economies of scale and diseconomies of scope in management.

• Journal of Yeungnam Medical Science
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• v.40 no.2
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• pp.156-163
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• 2023

Background: Interest in digital medical information has increased because it allows doctors to easily access a patient's medical records and provide appropriate medical care. Blockchain technology ensures data safety, reliability, integrity, and transparency by distributing medical data to all users over a peer-to-peer network. This study attempted to assess pediatricians' thoughts and attitudes toward introducing blockchain technology into the medical field. Methods: This study used a questionnaire survey to examine the thoughts and attitudes of 30- to 60-year-old pediatricians regarding the introduction of blockchain technology into the medical field. Responses to each item were recorded on a scale ranging from 1 (never agree) to 7 (completely agree). Results: The scores for the intentions and expectations of using blockchain technology were 4.0 to 4.6. Pediatricians from tertiary hospitals responded more positively (4.5-4.9) to the idea of using blockchain technology for hospital work relative to the general population (4.3-4.7). However, pediatricians working in primary and secondary hospitals had a slightly negative view of the application of blockchain technology to hospital work (p=0.018). Conclusion: When introducing the medical records of related pediatric and adolescent patients using blockchain technology in the future, it would be better to conduct a pilot project that prioritizes pediatricians in tertiary hospitals. The cost, policy, and market participants' perceptions are essential factors to consider when introducing technology in the medical field.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.59-73
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• 2013

Healthcare costs are continuously increasing due to longer life expectancy and providing global healthcare services through medical tourism is new service growth engine for Korea. Several countries have well established programs and infrastructure dedicated to medical tourism. South Korea is attempting to become a major player in this domain by undertaking broad initiatives. The success of medical tourism is greatly impacted by easy access to two types of information, namely, medical and travel information. The National Health Insurance System in Korea collects huge amount of clinical and financial information from all hospitals. However, this information does not get used effectively in health and travel information systems to support medical tourism. This paper provide clear process map of medical tourism to understand how the patient and information process both medical and tourism fields also describe the need of customer and service provider. In this paper, we develop a medical tourism service system that will promote information exchange and service delivery.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.374-379
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• 2005

In the most of medical institution medical information is totally stored in a database and many number of researchers and staffs of the hospital access these information anytime. This can be caused patient's privacy to be violated. Introducing a tool for security should be considered as one of the most important requirement especially in the case that today's medical information service expands into an integrated one. In this paper we review the matters of security threat on a medical information system and propose a secure medical information service model equipped on mobile device such as PDA. Also we propose a security architecture employing a digital signature mechanism to protect the personal information on the model. Proposed architecture can lead the doctor to diagnose with high responsibility, help to build a reliable medical information system. and through the signed data, we can get some useful information against medical strife.

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.35-47
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• 2018

Background: The purpose of this study is to elucidate the context of medical experience and the perception of unmet healthcare of elderly people with chronic diseases based on in-depth interview data. Methods: We carried out in-depth interviews with 10 elderly people with chronic diseases using semi-structured questionnaires based on literature review. The in-depth interview data were analyzed using thematic analysis; one qualitative research methodology, three core meaning categories, and four attributes associated with unmet healthcare were ultimately derived. Results: The context of the medical experience were based on the following three categories: (1) discomfort due to diseases and high medical needs, (2) the poor community medical environment and difficulties in accessing to metropolitan medical institutions, and (3) inconvenience caused by long waiting time and side effects of medicine. In addition, the elderly with chronic disease realized the unmet healthcare as (1) the availability related to the desired medical institutions at the right time, (2) the affordability related to their economic capacity, (3) the effectiveness of the medical services they experienced, and (4) the appropriateness related to receiving medical services in a pleasant environment. Conclusion: The perception of unmet healthcare among the elderly with chronic disease is the result of interaction of multi-level and multi-dimensional factors related with their medical experience.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.21 no.12
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• pp.505-516
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• 2021

The purpose of this study is to develop sign language interpreting content in the medical setting that facilitates Deaf people's access to medical services in situations where professional and accurate medical sign language interpreting is insufficient. To achieve the purpose of this study, we conducted a literature review, individual interviews for Deaf people, on-site requirement surveys of sign language interpreters and sign language experts, and medical and sign language expert consultations. Based on this, we developed sign language interpreting content such as main care contextual scenarios, basic medical terms, and medical term descriptions. Through this study, we developed medical sign language content considering the situation and medical importance of Deaf people to promote expertise in the medial sign language area and developed a responsive website of sign language medical dictionary that effectively and efficiently delivers information to Deaf people and sign language interpreters; we realized the need and importance of sign language translation for Deaf people to be the main bodies.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.17 no.sup1
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• pp.25-29
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• 2016

Efforts to reduce tobacco use among school children need to be based on understanding of access to cigarettes by these subjects because previous studies indicated that enforcement of laws for controlling tobacco sales seems to not affect teen/school children because they can obtain cigarettes from different sources. This paper aims to describe access to and availability of cigarettes among school students (aged 13-15 years old) according to the data from GYTS Vietnam 2014. In GYTS, a national school-based survey of students of grades 8-10, our findings showed that about 15% school children are current smokers who smoke at home, and that they could easily buy cigarettes from stores (63.2%), or someone else (27.8%), or street vendors (9%). Notably, over 85% of school children answered that they were not refused because of their age. This high percentage was nearly the same in the North (85.7%), the Centre (92.5%), and the South (89.7%) of Viet Nam. These findings show that it is quite easy for school children to obtain cigarettes and this is a crucial challenge for policy makers aiming to reduce tobacco use among youth in general and school-age students in particular.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.17 no.sup1
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• pp.31-36
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• 2016

Scientific evidence on all aspects of smoking amongst youth is very important for designing appropriate interventions to reduce smoking among this vulnerable population. This paper describes current access to anti-smoking information among school children aged 13 to 15 years in Vietnam in 2014 and examines its potential impact on preventing smoking initiation. The data used in this paper were obtained from the 2014 Global Youth Tobacco Survey (GYTS) in Vietnam. Students were asked questions about their level of awareness of anti-smoking information from various sources in the past 30 days and about lessons in school regarding the dangers of tobacco use during the last 12 months. Those who have never smoked were asked "whether or not they thought about avoiding cigarettes because of health warnings on cigarette packages" and answers were analyzed in combination with data on access to anti-smoking information from other sources. The prevalence of exposure to antismoking campaigns was high among school children in Viet Nam: 55.3% of current smokers reported thoughts of smoking cessation because of health warnings on cigarette packages; 60.5% of never smokers avoided initiating smoking because of the same health warnings. The potential impact of graphic health warnings to prevent school-aged children from smoking initiation would be stronger if there was concurrent access to anti-smoking programs on the dangers of tobacco use in schools. However, school education for tobacco prevention and control has not been as strong as expected. A more comprehensive school curriculum on tobacco prevention and control is recommended to reinforce antismoking messages among school children.

• Healthcare Informatics Research
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.253-262
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• 2018

Objectives: We reviewed digital epidemiological studies to characterize how researchers are using digital data by topic domain, study purpose, data source, and analytic method. Methods: We reviewed research articles published within the last decade that used digital data to answer epidemiological research questions. Data were abstracted from these articles using a data collection tool that we developed. Finally, we summarized the characteristics of the digital epidemiological studies. Results: We identified six main topic domains: infectious diseases (58.7%), non-communicable diseases (29.4%), mental health and substance use (8.3%), general population behavior (4.6%), environmental, dietary, and lifestyle (4.6%), and vital status (0.9%). We identified four categories for the study purpose: description (22.9%), exploration (34.9%), explanation (27.5%), and prediction and control (14.7%). We identified eight categories for the data sources: web search query (52.3%), social media posts (31.2%), web portal posts (11.9%), webpage access logs (7.3%), images (7.3%), mobile phone network data (1.8%), global positioning system data (1.8%), and others (2.8%). Of these, 50.5% used correlation analyses, 41.3% regression analyses, 25.6% machine learning, and 19.3% descriptive analyses. Conclusions: Digital data collected for non-epidemiological purposes are being used to study health phenomena in a variety of topic domains. Digital epidemiology requires access to large datasets and advanced analytics. Ensuring open access is clearly at odds with the desire to have as little personal data as possible in these large datasets to protect privacy. Establishment of data cooperatives with restricted access may be a solution to this dilemma.