Exploring the Healthcare of Patients with Osteoarthritis of the Knee: A Mixed Methods

• Main Authors: Chun-Liang Lai, 賴俊良
• Other Authors: Kwoting Fang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/53739681296239457879

博士 === 雲林科技大學 === 管理研究所博士班 === 98 === Osteoarthritis of the knee increases in prevalence with age. An estimated of 10 percent of the world’s population who are 60 years or older have symptom of osteoarthritis. Osteoarthritis causes significant pain, disability, and decline of lifestyle and finances. Therefore, the discuss of treatment and outcome of osteoarthritis are critical We use a supply and demand viewpoint to explore what treatments are really necessary for the patient. Apart from surgical treatment option, osteoarthritis of the knee treatments options generally fall into three major categories, drug treatment, non-drug treatment and alternative treatment, such as glucosamine. The design of this study applies both qualitative and quantitative techniques in order to discuss the healthcare of patients with osteoarthritis of the knee in medical institutions. In quantitative stage, we investigated the effectiveness of therapy when given to patients of different contexts. First, we employed decision tree algorithm to explore the rules that affecting the outcome. Then, neural network was used to precede sensitivity analysis, which does allow us to measure the relative influence each attribute has on the output results. Next, we explored scenario and incident model to identify the causal factors of the initial state and analyzed each scenario. In qualitative method, the main purpose of this stage is to use the ethnographic decision tree model to understand and explore the decision criteria of the patients. Our study found that the recommendation of physician or friend is the most important decision criteria elicited from the interviews. There are also medication compliance, willing to pay their own expenses, afraid of side effect and symptom that affecting daily life, which elicited from the interviews. We proposed formal concept analysis method to demonstrate the hierarchy of decision criteria and build the ethnographic decision tree. In the validation stage, the ethnographic decision tree model successfully predicts 95.37% accuracy of the interviewers. The findings of this study may suggest hospital and physician adjust the supply of treatments, to improve medical quality, and provide the patient a way to adopt proper treatment of individuals.