PURPOSE: The purpose of the study is to find whether there is any effect on shortening the length of stay of long term patients due to issuing of hospitalization sheets by emergency department. METHODS: For the investigation, 27,948 patients who resided in hospitals over 6 hours from 2006 to 2007 were chosen as the subjects. The main materials for the investigation were various time variables according to the medical records. For the verification of each factor, Student's t-test and Pearson' correlation coefficient were used. RESULTS: There was statistically significant difference in regard to length of stay (p<0.01). The departments related to internal medicine showed that they required longer times in every aspect compared to those of non-internal medicine. There were statistically significant differences (p<0.01) in regard to the time of patients' length of stay and the time of issuing sheets for hospitalization according to the numbers of related department. However, there was no meaningful difference in regard to the waiting time for hospitalization. CONCLUSION: In conclusion, in the cases of long term patients who stayed over 6 hours in 2007 when the random sheets for hospitalization were issued by emergency department, the length of stay was significantly reduced. It was found that the time was more increased in the departments of internal medicine than the departments of noninternal medicine and when the related sub departments increased.
Emergencies ; Emergency Medicine ; Hospitalization ; Humans ; Internal Medicine ; Length of Stay ; Medical Records

OBJECTIVES: This study was investigated the recovery characteristics of propofol-remifentanil and sevoflurane-remifentanil anesthesia for total thyroidectomy. METHODS: Eighty patients in ASA physical status 1 and 2 scheduled for total thyroidectomy were allocated randomly to either group P (n = 40) or group S (n = 40). Anesthesia was maintained with remifentanil effect site concentration (Ce) 1-3 ng/mL and propofol Ce 2-4 microg/mL in the group P, and was maintained with remifentanil Ce 1-3 ng/mL and sevoflurane 1.5-2% in the group S. Blood pressure, heart rate, and bispectral (BIS) index were measured during perioperative period. The times from discontinuance of anesthetic agent to eye opening, to extubation, and to stating name were measured. Postoperative complications were evaluated. RESULTS: There were no significant differences between group P and S on the blood pressure, heart rate, and recovery time. BIS index of group P showed lower than that of group S during operation (P < 0.05). The incidences of side effects were similar in the two groups, though the incidence of nausea was higher in the group S (P < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: Propofol-remifentanil anesthesia was more advantageous than sevoflurane-remifentanil anesthesia for thyroidectomy in view of side effect incidences.
Anesthesia* ; Blood Pressure ; Heart Rate ; Humans ; Incidence ; Nausea ; Perioperative Period ; Postoperative Complications ; Propofol ; Thyroidectomy*

PURPOSE: The large disparity in outcomes of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) between communities makes it important determine pre-hospital factors associated with outcome of OHCA. The study evaluated pre-hospital care performed by 119 rescuers in OHCA and investigated pre-hospital factors that influenced return of spontaneous circulation (ROSC) and automated external defibrillator (AED) use. METHODS: We retrospectively analyzed 119 OHCA patients with presumed cardiac origin admitted to our emergency department transported by 119 rescuers from May 2007 to April 2010. Patients were divided according to achievement of ROSC and AED use prior to comparative analysis. RESULTS: Twenty six patients (21.8%) experienced ROSC and only five patients (4.2%) survived to discharge. In the study area, scene-to-hospital arrival time was significantly shorter in the ROSC group (15.0+/-5.8 minutes) than the non-ROSC group (19.4+/-9.1 minutes) (p=0.02) and electrocardiography (ECG) application was associated with non-AED use. CONCLUSION: Cooperation of emergency medical services and hospitals in the community to reduce hospital arrival time is needed to improve ROSC in OHCA patients. AED use on scene prior to ECG application will be encouraged and higher level training and continuous education of 119 rescuers for AED use will be needed to enhance AED application.
Achievement ; Defibrillators ; Electrocardiography ; Emergencies ; Emergency Medical Services ; Humans ; Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest ; Retrospective Studies

This paper describes a community effort to improve earlier versions of the full-text corpus of Genomics & Informatics by semi-automatically detecting and correcting PDF-to-text conversion errors and optical character recognition errors during the first hackathon of Genomics & Informatics Annotation Hackathon (GIAH) event. Extracting text from multi-column biomedical documents such as Genomics & Informatics is known to be notoriously difficult. The hackathon was piloted as part of a coding competition of the ELTEC College of Engineering at Ewha Womans University in order to enable researchers and students to create or annotate their own versions of the Genomics & Informatics corpus, to gain and create knowledge about corpus linguistics, and simultaneously to acquire tangible and transferable skills. The proposed projects during the hackathon harness an internal database containing different versions of the corpus and annotations.

This paper describes a community effort to improve earlier versions of the full-text corpus of Genomics & Informatics by semi-automatically detecting and correcting PDF-to-text conversion errors and optical character recognition errors during the first hackathon of Genomics & Informatics Annotation Hackathon (GIAH) event. Extracting text from multi-column biomedical documents such as Genomics & Informatics is known to be notoriously difficult. The hackathon was piloted as part of a coding competition of the ELTEC College of Engineering at Ewha Womans University in order to enable researchers and students to create or annotate their own versions of the Genomics & Informatics corpus, to gain and create knowledge about corpus linguistics, and simultaneously to acquire tangible and transferable skills. The proposed projects during the hackathon harness an internal database containing different versions of the corpus and annotations.