Healthcare utilization and costs for patients with Parkinson's disease in Taiwan.

Background: Parkinson's disease (PD) exerts a considerable burden on the elderly. Studies on long-term costs for Parkinson's disease patients in Taiwan are not available.

Objectives: This study aims to examine the medical resource utilization and medical costs including drug costs for PD patients in Taiwan over up to 15 years of follow-up.

Hospital Board of Directors' Composition and Financial Performance: Empirical Evidence from Taiwan.

The board of directors of a nonprofit proprietary hospital is responsible for supervising and managing major operational matters and reviewing operational results. This study investigates how hospital financial performance is influenced by director and supervisor characteristics among the board members of nonprofit proprietary hospitals in Taiwan. Data were obtained from the Division of Medical Services of the Ministry of Health and Welfare.

The longitudinal study for the work-related factors to job performance among nurses in emergency department.

To explore the relationship between baseline information, personal factors, working characteristics and job performance among nurses in emergency department in northern Taiwan.Two-hundred twenty-two nursing staff were interviewed repeated with structured questionnaires for data collection in 3 time points (From August to September, 2008, from February to March, 2009, and from November to December, 2009). The generalized estimating equation (GEE) is used to test the relationship between the domains of independent variables (baseline information, personal factors, working characteristics) and dependent variables (task performance, contextual performance).

Productivity growth and quality changes of hospitals in Taiwan: does ownership matter?

As the competition in the Taiwanese medical industry becomes increasingly fierce, public hospitals are confronted with challenges in orientation and operations. This study measured changes in the operational efficiency of public and their competitors, non-public hospitals, in Taiwan. This study considered differences in technology and scale between public and non-public hospitals and adopted the quality-incorporating metafrontier Malmquist productivity index to analyze inputs, outputs, and quality achievements of hospitals.

Healthcare resource utilization and costs among patients with rheumatoid arthritis on biologic therapies in Taiwan: A 1-year mirror-image study using a national claims database.

Objectives: This nationwide population-based study aimed at evaluating healthcare resource utilization and direct medical costs among rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients receiving biologic therapies in Taiwan.

Design And Setting: A retrospective cohort of 2,425 RA patients who had received first-line tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α antagonist treatment for at least 6 months (the baseline period) between 2007 and 2011 was identified from the National Health Insurance Research Database in Taiwan.

Outcome Measures: Healthcare resource utilization and direct medical costs of those patients were analyzed and compared 1 year before the index date and during the 1-year follow-up.

The impact of different surgical procedures on hypoparathyroidism after thyroidectomy: A population-based study.

The main objective of this study is to investigate the outcome between surgical procedures and the risk of development of hypoparathyroidism followed by surgical procedure in patients with thyroid disorders.We analyzed the data acquired from Taiwan's Bureau of National Health Insurance (BNHI) research database from 1998 to 2011 and found 9316 patients with thyroid surgery. Cox regression model was used to calculate the hazard ratio (HR).

Decreased clinic visits for acute respiratory infections following an adult tonsillectomy: A population-based study.

Purpose: This study attempted to investigate the effects of a tonsillectomy on utilization of medical resources for acute respiratory infections by comparing numbers and costs of clinic visits within 1year before and after a tonsillectomy.

Materials And Methods: Data for this study were retrieved from the Taiwan Longitudinal Health Insurance Database 2005. The study includes 481 patients aged 18-80years who underwent a tonsillectomy and 481 comparison patients.

Metafrontier frameworks for studying hospital productivity growth and quality changes.

Objective: The objective of this study was to evaluate productivity growth and quality changes among different levels of accredited hospitals.

Design: This study used an attribute-incorporating Malmquist productivity index (MPI) under the metafrontier framework. This is the first attempt to compare productivity changes among hospitals operating under different production frontiers.

Interactions between traditional Chinese medicine and western drugs in Taiwan: A population-based study.

Background: Drug-drug interactions have long been an active research area in clinical medicine. In Taiwan, however, the widespread use of traditional Chinese medicines (TCM) presents additional complexity to the topic. Therefore, it is important to see the interaction between traditional Chinese and western medicine.

Insight into Evolution, Processing and Performance of Multi-length-scale Structures in Planar Heterojunction Perovskite Solar Cells.

The structural characterization correlated to the processing control of hierarchical structure of planar heterojunction perovskite layer is still incomplete due to the limitations of conventional microscopy and X-ray diffraction. This present study performed the simultaneously grazing-incidence small-angle scattering and wide-angle scattering (GISAXS/GIWAXS) techniques to quantitatively probe the hierarchical structure of the planar heterojunction perovskite solar cells. The result is complementary to the currently microscopic study.

LabPush: a pilot study of providing remote clinics with laboratory results via short message service (SMS) in Swaziland, Africa - a qualitative study.

Background: Developing countries are confronting a steady growth in the prevalence of the infectious diseases. Mobile technologies are widely available and can play an important role in health care at the regional, community, and individual levels. Although labs usually able to accomplish the requested blood test and produce the results within two days after receiving the samples, but the time for the results to be delivered back to clinics is quite variable depending on how often the motorbike transport makes trips between the clinic and the lab.

The economic burden of psoriatic diseases in Taiwan.

Background: Psoriasis is associated with significant economic burdens. Data regarding costs for psoriasis patients in Taiwan are not available.

Objective: To estimate the economic burden of psoriasis in Taiwan.