• Asia pacific journal of information systems
• /
• v.21 no.3
• /
• pp.71-96
• /
• 2011

Within the traditional medical delivery system, patients residing in medically vulnerable areas, those with body movement difficulties, and nursing facility residents have had limited access to good healthcare services. However, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) provides us with a convenient and useful means of overcoming distance and time constraints. ICT is integrated with biomedical science and technology in a way that offers a new high-quality medical service. As a result, rapid technological advancement is expected to play a pivotal role bringing about innovation in a wide range of medical service areas, such as medical management, testing, diagnosis, and treatment; offering new and improved healthcare services; and effecting dramatic changes in current medical services. The increase in aging population and chronic diseases has caused an increase in medical expenses. In response to the increasing demand for efficient healthcare services, a telehealth service based on ICT is being emphasized on a global level. Telehealth services have been implemented especially in pilot projects and system development and technological research. With the service about to be implemented in earnest, it is necessary to study its overall acceptance by consumers, which is expected to contribute to the development and activation of a variety of services. In this sense, the study aims at positively examining the structural relationship among the acceptance factors for telehealth services based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). Data were collected by showing audiovisual material on telehealth services to online panels and requesting them to respond to a structured questionnaire sheet, which is known as the information acceleration method. Among the 1,165 adult respondents, 608 valid samples were finally chosen, while the remaining were excluded because of incomplete answers or allotted time overrun. In order to test the reliability and validity of the assessment scale items, we carried out reliability and factor analyses, and in order to explore the causal relation among potential variables, we conducted a structural equation modeling analysis using AMOS 7.0 and SPSS 17.0. The research outcomes are as follows. First, service quality, innovativeness of medical technology, and social influence were shown to affect perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness of the telehealth service, which was statistically significant, and the two factors had a positive impact on willingness to accept the telehealth service. In addition, social influence had a direct, significant effect on intention to use, which is paralleled by the TAM used in previous research on technology acceptance. This shows that the research model proposed in the study effectively explains the acceptance of the telehealth service. Second, the research model reveals that information privacy concerns had a insignificant impact on perceived ease of use of the telehealth service. From this, it can be gathered that the concerns over information protection and security are reduced further due to advancements in information technology compared to the initial period in the information technology industry, and thus the improvement in quality of medical services appeared to ensure that information privacy concerns did not act as a prohibiting factor in the acceptance of the telehealth service. Thus, if other factors have an enormous impact on ease of use and usefulness, concerns over these results in the initial period of technology acceptance may become irrelevant. However, it is clear that users' information privacy concerns, as other studies have revealed, is a major factor affecting technology acceptance. Thus, caution must be exercised while interpreting the result, and further study is required on the issue. Numerous information technologies with outstanding performance and innovativeness often attract few consumers. A revised bill for those urgently in need of telehealth services is about to be approved in the national assembly. As telemedicine is implemented between doctors and patients, a wide range of systems that will improve the quality of healthcare services will be designed. In this sense, the study on the consumer acceptance of telehealth services is meaningful and offers strong academic evidence. Based on the implications, it can be expected to contribute to the activation of telehealth services. Further study is needed to assess the acceptance factors for telehealth services, such as motivation to remain healthy, health care involvement, knowledge on health, and control of health-related behavior, in order to develop unique services according to the categorization of customers based on health factors. In addition, further study may focus on various theoretical cognitive behavior models other than the TAM, such as the health belief model.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
• /
• v.14 no.4
• /
• pp.1010-1032
• /
• 2018

Recent advances in medical science have made people live longer, which has affected many aspects of life, such as caregiver burden, increasing cost of healthcare, increasing number of disabled and depressive disorder persons, and so on. Researchers are now focused on elderly living assistance services in smart home environments. In recent years, assisted living technologies have rapidly grown due to a faster growing aging society. Many smart devices are now interconnected within the home network environment and such a home setup supports collaborations between those devices based on the Internet of Things (IoT). One of the major challenges in providing elderly living assistance services is to consider each individual's requirements of different needs. In order to solve this, the virtualization of physical things, as well as the collaboration and composition of services provided by these physical things should be considered. In order to meet these challenges, Web of Objects (WoO) focuses on the implementation aspects of IoT to bring the assorted real world objects with the web applications. We proposed a semantic modelling technique for manual and semi-automated service composition. The aim of this work is to propose a framework to enable RESTful web services composition using semantic ontology for elderly living assistance services creation in WoO based smart home environment.

• Journal of Society of Preventive Korean Medicine
• /
• v.21 no.3
• /
• pp.75-85
• /
• 2017

Objectives : The new health technology assessment (nHTA) involves evaluating the safety and efficacy of the new health technology under the Medical Services Act by the New Health Technology Assessment Project Division from 2007. The purpose of this study is to understand the status of applications and recent trends of the results, and suggest strategies for the development of new health technologies in Korean Medicine. Methods : We investigated and analyzed the results of evaluation of new health technology of whole conventional medical and the list of new health technologies in Korean Medicine provided by the New Health Technology Assessment Project Division from 2007 to 2016. Results : The number of applications for new health technology of Korean medicine was low as 41 items in the whole number of 2,013 items. The evaluation method of new health technologies in both, the whole medical and Korean medicine fields was the same, but the tendency in results was very different. Most of the new health technology items in Korean medicine were classified as existing technology (20 items), early stage technology (7 items), and Only 2 items were evaluated as research stage technology. Conclusions : In order to develop new health technology in the Korean medical field, we have made suggestions about the health technology assessment systems, R&D infrastructures, and corporation with conventional medicines.

• Health Policy and Management
• /
• v.32 no.2
• /
• pp.125-136
• /
• 2022

The costliness index (CI) is an index that is used in various ways to improve the quality of medical care and the management of appropriate treatment in medical institutions. However, the current calculation method for CI has a limitation in reflecting the actual medical cost of the patient unit because the outpatient and inpatient costs are evaluated separately. It is desirable to calculate the CI by integrating the medical cost into the episode unit. We developed an episode-based CI method using the episode classification system of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to the National Inpatient Sample data in Korea, which can integrate the admission and ambulatory care cost to episode unit. Additionally, we compared our new method with the previous method. In some episodes, the correlation between previous and episode-based CI was low, and the proportion of outpatient treatment costs in total cost and readmission rates are high. As a result of regression analysis, it is possible that the level of total medical costs of the patient unit in low volume medical institute and rural area has been underestimated. High proportion of outpatient treatment cost in total medical cost means that some medical institutions may have provided medical services in the ambulatory care that are ancillary to inpatient treatment. In addition, a high readmission rate indicates insufficient treatment service for inpatients, which means that previous CI may not accurately reflect actual patient-based treatment costs. Therefore, an integrated patient-unit classification system which can be used as a more effective CI indicator is needed.

• Journal of Convergence for Information Technology
• /
• v.9 no.4
• /
• pp.1-7
• /
• 2019

The medical environment, combined with IT technology, is changing the paradigm for medical services from treatment to prevention. In particular, as ICT convergence digital healthcare technology is applied to hospital medical systems, infrastructure technologies such as big data, Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence are being used in conjunction with the cloud. In particular, as medical services are used with IT devices, the quality of medical services is increasingly improving to make them easier for users to access. Medical institutions seeking to incorporate IoT services into cloud health care environment services are trying to reduce hospital operating costs and improve service quality, but have not yet been fully supported. In this paper, a patient information collection model from hospital IoT system, which has established a cloud environment, is proposed. The proposed model prevents third parties from illegally eavesdropping and interfering with patients' biometric information through IoT devices attached to the patient's body at hospitals in cloud environments that have established hospital IoT systems. The proposed model allows clinicians to analyze patients' disease information so that they can collect and treat diseases associated with their eating habits through IoT devices. The analyzed disease information minimizes hospital work to facilitate the handling of prescriptions and care according to the patient's degree of illness.

• Journal of Service Research and Studies
• /
• v.4 no.1
• /
• pp.83-93
• /
• 2014

Telemedicine is performed at a place far away from medical practice with physicians and patients by the means of communication appropriately. It will be identified in general the remote medical service to deliver the medical information and also defined as any action by interactive information communication technology. Medical services can be said to be fused as television, communication, computer, engineering of various technologies of information and communication applications. If doctors can not be reached due to distances away from the patient, Information technologies could be used to get medical information and to give expert advice provided by the system remotely. And it could be used patient care as well as medical administration, medical education, professional advice and consulting. In this paper, we take a look at the legal requirements of telemedicine for improving regulatory in the current law to investigate the matter.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
• /
• 2016.05a
• /
• pp.453-456
• /
• 2016

Recently, IoT technologies attract much attenction in medical area. Previous medical IoT had focused mainly on chronological diseases or fitness for particular users. Contrarily, medical use of the IoT technologies is now extended for medical institutes and hospitals to care intensively in-house patients, which requires typically more strict and reliable data delivery and security, authentication and authorization. This study defines scenario of the medical IoT for the intensive care and proposes an architecture of the medical IoT services. We implement a testbed using commerical sensors and Arduino board together with a Web-based platform. Experiment results on the testbed show that our approach can be feasible for the medical system in terms of latency and accuracy in medical data delivery.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
• /
• v.16 no.2
• /
• pp.172-178
• /
• 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic has been reshaping the world by accelerating non-contact services and technologies in various domains. Hospitals as a healthcare system lie at the center of the dramatic change because of their fundamental roles: medical diagnosis and treatments. Leading experts in health, science, and technologies have predicted that robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) can drive such a hospital transformation. Accordingly, several government-led projects have been developed and started toward smarter hospitals, where robots and AI replace or support healthcare personnel, particularly in the diagnosis and non-surgical treatment procedures. This article inspects the remaining element of healthcare services, i.e., surgical treatment, focusing on evaluating whether or not currently available laparoscopic surgical robotic systems are sufficiently preparing for the era of post-COVID-19 when contactless is the new normal. Challenges and future directions towards an effective, fully non-contact surgery are identified and summarized, including remote surgery assistance, domain-expansion of robotic surgery, and seamless integration with smart operating rooms, followed by emphasis on robot tranining for surgical staff.

• Journal of the Korean Society for information Management
• /
• v.26 no.3
• /
• pp.435-449
• /
• 2009

Rapid change in information use environments that corresponds with the development of new technologies requires a new perspective in examining information source uses and information services. As understanding information seeking behaviors is an essential element for improving information services, the changing information seeking behaviors should be examined in a timely manner. While several prior studies focus on this topic, few studies deal with medical doctors' information seeking behaviors especially focusing on information seeking in both medical practices and research. Thus, this study aims to explore the information seeking behaviors of medical doctors who are both medical practitioners and researchers. Data were obtained by open-ended and semi-structured in-depth interviews during one month from April to May, 2009. The interview-question topics ranged from research contexts, medical-practice-related information seeking behaviors, favorable information sources, and information search process and satisfaction. Findings include that, for research purpose, digital journal articles accessed through the PubMed were more favorable sources while, for practice purpose, printed textbooks were preferred. Overall, the most-frequently-used sources were PubMed and articles because medical doctors regard the reliability and authority very highly.

• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
• /
• v.28 no.1
• /
• pp.1-12
• /
• 2021

The purpose of this study is to analyze the medical ecosystem in the post-corona era. In addition, this study introduces a new medical CRM model that allows primary-level hospitals to overcome the economic difficulties and to occupy a competitive advantage in the post-corona era. The medical environment in the post-corona era is expected to be changed by non-face-to-face treatment, reinforcement of public medical care, the transformation of a medical system centered on the primary-level hospitals, and the use of AI and big data technologies. The medical CRM model presented in this study emphasizes the establishment of mutual customer relationships through close information exchange between patients, primary-level hospital, and the government. In the post-corona era, primary-level hospitals should not simply be approached as private hospital pursuing profitability. These should be reestablished as the hospitals that can provide public health care services while ensuring stable profitability.