In 2019, the National Evidence-based Healthcare Collaborating Agency (NECA) in Korea established a health technology reassessment (HTR) system to manage the life cycle of health technologies and develop operational measures promoting the efficient use of healthcare resources. The purpose of this study is to introduce the detailed implementation process and practical functional methods of the HTR implemented by NECA.

The HTR is a structured multidisciplinary method for analyzing health technologies currently used in the healthcare system based on the latest information on parameters, such as clinical safety, effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness of optimizing the use of healthcare resources as well as social and ethical issues. All decision-making stages of the HTR are carefully reviewed and transparently managed. The HTR committee makes significant decisions, and the subcommittee decides the details related to the assessment process.

Since the pilot began in 2018, 262 cases have been reassessed, of which, 126 cases (48.1 percent) were health services not covered by the National Health Insurance (NHI). Over the past 5 years, approximately 130 recommendations for the in-use technologies were determined by the HTR committee. In the near future, it will be necessary to officially develop and establish a Korean HTR system and a legal foundation to optimize the NHI system.

This study presents a conceptual replication of Birulés et al.’s (2020, Experiment 2) investigation of native and nonnative listeners’ selective attention to a talker’s mouth with the goal of better understanding the potentially modulating role of proficiency in listeners’ reliance on audiovisual speech cues. Listeners’ eye gaze was recorded while watching two short videos. Findings from one of the videos replicated results from the original study, showing greater attention to the talker’s mouth among L2 than L1 listeners. In both videos, L2 proficiency modulated attention, with more fixations on the mouth among lower proficiency listeners, an effect predicted but not observed in the original study. Collectively, these laboratory-based findings highlight the role of visual speech cues in L2 listening and present evidence that listeners with more limited proficiency may be especially reliant on such cues. These observations warrant future investigations of the benefits of visual speech cues in instructional and assessment contexts.

Interdisciplinary programmes have become common in universities and research groups’ curricula. This study conducted a network analysis on a Korean university’s undergraduate curriculum and used several visualisation tools to assess keywords across courses and departments, revealing epistemological distances between the courses/departments and their concepts of study. This data-driven methodology defined the characteristics of close or neighbouring departments, making it possible to implement narrow interdisciplinarity through common subjects within the courses. Interestingly, a further projected network could determine the implicit relations between departments that are not considered close, which would make it possible to implement a wide interdisciplinary curriculum. The data-driven network analysis conducted in this study contributes to searching for new programmes for specific levels of interdisciplinarity on an empirical basis.

Background: The purpose of this study was to find out the relationship between appropriateness of antibiotic prescription and clinical outcomes in patients with community-acquired acute pyelonephritis (CA-APN). Methods: A multicenter prospective cohort study was performed in 8 Korean hospitals from September 2017 to August 2018. All hospitalized patients aged ≥19 years diagnosed with CA-APN at admission were recruited. Pregnant women and patients with insufficient data were excluded. In addition, patients with prolonged hospitalization due to medical problems that were not associated with APN treatment were excluded. The appropriateness of empirical and definitive antibiotics was divided into “optimal,” “suboptimal,” and “inappropriate,” and optimal and suboptimal were regarded as appropriate antibiotic use. The standard for the classification of empirical antibiotics was defined reflecting the Korean national guideline for the antibiotic use in urinary tract infection 2018. The standards for the classification of definitive antibiotics were defined according to the result of in vitro susceptibility tests of causative organisms. Clinical outcomes including clinical failure (mortality or recurrence) rate, hospitalization days, and medical costs were compared between patients who were prescribed antibiotics appropriately and those who were prescribed them inappropriately. Results: In total, 397 and 318 patients were eligible for the analysis of the appropriateness of empirical and definitive antibiotics, respectively. Of these, 10 (2.5%) and 18 (5.7%) were inappropriately prescribed empirical and definitive antibiotics, respectively, and 28 (8.8%) were prescribed either empirical or definitive antibiotics inappropriately. Patients who were prescribed empirical antibiotics appropriately showed a lower mortality rate (0 vs 10%; P = .025), shorter hospitalization days (9 vs 12.5 days; P = .014), and lower medical costs (US$2,333 vs US$4,531; P = .007) compared to those who were prescribed empirical antibiotics “inappropriately.” In comparison, we detected no significant differences in clinical outcomes between patients who were prescribed definitive antibiotics appropriately and those who were prescribed definitive antibiotics inappropriately. Patients who were prescribed both empirical and definitive antibiotics appropriately showed a lower clinical failure rate (0.3 vs 7.1%; P = .021) and shorter hospitalization days (9 vs 10.5 days; P = .041) compared to those who were prescribed either empirical or definitive antibiotics inappropriately. Conclusions: Appropriate use of antibiotics leads patients with CA-APN to better clinical outcomes including fewer hospitalization days and lower medical costs.

Funding: No

Disclosures: None

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Ferroelectrics and related materials (e.g., non-traditional ferroelectrics such as relaxors) have long been used in a range of applications, but with the advent of new ways of modeling, synthesizing, and characterizing these materials, continued access to astonishing breakthroughs in our fundamental understanding come each year. While we still rely on these materials in a range of applications, we continue to re-write what is possible to be done with them. In turn, assumptions that have underpinned the use and design of certain materials are progressively being revisited. This perspective aims to provide an overview of the field of ferroelectric/relaxor/polar-oxide thin films in recent years, with an emphasis on emergent structure and function enabled by advanced synthesis, processing, and computational modeling.

With the surging number of digital devices penetrating our daily routines, the risks inherent to cybersecurity—the protection of data on digital products connected to the Internet—have also increased since these devices (e.g., connected home devices, personal monitoring) collect, process, analyze and store users’ sensitive personal information. Thus, there is a pressing need to assist users in being aware of and dealing with potential cybersecurity threats. With the proposition that fulfilling the need starts with developing an in-depth understanding of the user behaviors in the context of cybersecurity, an exploratory study was conducted that employed three mixed qualitative and quantitative research methods—a trend analysis, an interview study, and an online survey study. The paper reports the user characteristics on (1) awareness levels of cybersecurity issues, (2) uses of digital devices, and (3) means of dealing with the privacy issues in product use. The results of the studies were translated into eight personas that systematically reflect distinct characteristics of users, which can help designers empathize with their potential users vulnerable to cybersecurity risks.