Considering the current National Health Insurance system and the status of finance, many hospitals and clinics are cooperating or doing strategic alliance to achieve economies of scale. Although strategic alliance is common in Western medicine hospitals/ clinics, few Chinese medicine clinics have been done this way. Therefore, this study would like to discuss the behaviors of Chinese medicine clinics to understand how to use strategic alliance and differentiated business models to disencumber crisis for existence. This study selects two Chinese medicine clinics using strategic alliance to conduct case studies. After comparing business models and the ways of strategic alliance between the two clinics, it have been founded that the differences from business models lead to the two clinics have different motivations and methods of strategic alliance. Finally, this study provides some suggestions based on case studies in order to be referred by other Chinese medicine clinics.

Abstract Under the currently condition of he health care and medical financial in Taiwan, some hospitals already start the business management. The most successful case is Chang-Gung memorial Hospital. But due to the strong competition in the market, some basic clinics start to ally with their competition for more effectively using the medical resources and running. The alliance strategy gradually unify the basic medical market with their professional , fluently interflow, decreasing material , brand union, marketing and management. In Taiwan this kind of alliance strategy is common in the western medicine and seldom Chinese medicine has done in this way. This research is basic on the alliance strategy of Chinese medicine. To escape of the survival problem, the basic Chinese medicine clinics must understand how to use their area to ally and run with their competitions. This study is taken one Chinese medicine alliance as sample in Kaohsiung to start the research in order to understand their alliance strategy and how they run the business. The result of research can be the reference for the ones who need the alliance strategy.

No description available.

Thesis (M. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 83-87).

Yes / Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is an individualized medicine by observing the symptoms and signs (symptoms in brief) of patients. We aim to extract the meaningful herb-symptom relationships from large scale TCM clinical data. To investigate the correlations between symptoms and herbs held for patients, we use four clinical data sets collected from TCM outpatient clinical settings and calculate the similarities between patient pairs in terms of the herb constituents of their prescriptions and their manifesting symptoms by cosine measure. To address the large-scale multiple testing problems for the detection of herb-symptom associations and the dependence between herbs involving similar efficacies, we propose a network-based correlation analysis (NetCorrA) method to detect the herb-symptom associations. The results show that there are strong positive correlations between symptom similarity and herb similarity, which indicates that herb-symptom correspondence is a clinical principle adhered to by most TCM physicians. Furthermore, the NetCorrA method obtains meaningful herb-symptom associations and performs better than the chi-square correlation method by filtering the false positive associations. Symptoms play significant roles for the prescriptions of herb treatment. The herb-symptom correspondence principle indicates that clinical phenotypic targets (i.e., symptoms) of herbs exist and would be valuable for further investigations.

No / Real-world clinical setting is the major arena of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) as it has experienced long-term practical clinical activities, and developed established theoretical knowledge and clinical solutions suitable for personalized treatment. Clinical phenotypes have been the most important features captured by TCM for diagnoses and treatment, which are diverse and dynamically changeable in real-world clinical settings. Together with clinical prescription with multiple herbal ingredients for treatment, TCM clinical activities embody immense valuable data with high dimensionalities for knowledge distilling and hypothesis generation. In China, with the curation of large-scale real-world clinical data from regular clinical activities, transforming the data to clinical insightful knowledge has increasingly been a hot topic in TCM field. This chapter introduces the application of data warehouse techniques and data mining approaches for utilizing real-world TCM clinical data, which is mainly from electronic medical records. The main framework of clinical data mining applications in TCM field is also introduced with emphasizing on related work in this field. The key points and issues to improve the research quality are discussed and future directions are proposed.

BACKGROUND:There is a need for more Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) on Chinese medicine (CM) to inform clinical and policy decision-making. This document aims to provide consensus advice for the design of CER trials on CM for researchers. It broadly aims to ensure more adequate design and optimal use of resources in generating evidence for CM to inform stakeholder decision-making.METHODS:The Effectiveness Guidance Document (EGD) development was based on multiple consensus procedures (survey, written Delphi rounds, interactive consensus workshop, international expert review). To balance aspects of internal and external validity, multiple stakeholders, including patients, clinicians, researchers and payers were involved in creating this document.RESULTS:Recommendations were developed for "using available data" and "future clinical studies". The recommendations for future trials focus on randomized trials and cover the following areas: designing CER studies, treatments, expertise and setting, outcomes, study design and statistical analyses, economic evaluation, and publication.CONCLUSION:The present EGD provides the first systematic methodological guidance for future CER trials on CM and can be applied to single or multi-component treatments. While CONSORT statements provide guidelines for reporting studies, EGDs provide recommendations for the design of future studies and can contribute to a more strategic use of limited research resources, as well as greater consistency in trial design.

There is community concern about toxic contaminants in Chinese herbal medicines. The two areas of contamination that attract most attentions are the nephrotoxic chemical, aristolochic acids found to be present in some Chinese herbs and resulting in renal failure of over 200 patients in Belgium, and heavy metals such as lead, arsenic, cadmium, mercury and chromium, which can cause systemic, CNS, neurological and developmental pathologies. Currently there is a lack of systematic information about the aristolochic acid content in Aristolochia species and related genera, nor have there been any studies on metal contamination conducted in Australia which can provide some scientific basis for assessment of potential risk of Chinese herbal medicines posed to consumers in Australia. This research aimed at addressing these concerns by firstly carrying out a systematic measurement of the contents of aristolochic acids in some relevant raw herbal medicines (CHM) and proprietary medicines (CPM)- 27 CHM, and 7 CPM, and secondly analysing the contents of five heavy metals in 100 CHM, 50 CPM, and 5 commonly used Chinese medicinal formulae (CMF) in the form of raw herbs, and finally evaluating the potential systemic metal toxicity caused by routine ingestions of Chinese medicines in the common form of encapsulated concentrated powder extracts formulated for the treatment of seasonal allergic rhinitis by means of measuring the metal concentrations in blood collected from 71 patients in a randomised double-blind control clinical trial (RCT). Results showed that four of the 37 CHM and two of the 7 CPM contained the banned toxic aristolochic acids. Some of these contaminated medicines could still be purchased over-the-counter in Victoria. Quantitative screening of metal contamination in CHM found that metal concentrations were much lower in the aqueous solutions than in the acid-digested samples. Almost all CHM, CPM and the 5 CMF contained the five heavy metals. Contrary to popular perception, their metal concentrations in the clinically ingested form were extremely low. Their prescribed ingested contents calculated as percentages of the universally recognised regulatory safety standards, the WHO provisional tolerable weekly intake (PTWI), would produce only small percentages of the PTWI for the metal concerned. This was true even when the metal intakes from any forms of Chinese medicines were added to the normal Australian daily dietary metal exposure. These new approaches of analysing the aqueous extractions, as well as interpretation with reference to the WHO regulatory standards and in combination with the Australian normal daily diet, are more relevant and realistic. The RCT in vivo study demonstrated no significant metal accumulation in the blood of both the real treatment group and the placebo control group, thus, attesting to the encouraging finding of the herbal medicine analysis. In conclusion, there is still much to improve in Australia in terms of enforcing the regulation of banning the sale of Chinese herbal medicines that might contain the highly nephrotoxic aristolochic acids. On the other hand, all forms of Chinese medicines in Victoria are safe, and do not appear to pose significant health concerns in terms of metal contamination.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 242-260). Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Riverside, 1993. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.