Background: In the Internet era, many web-based appointment systems for hospitals have been established to replace traditional systems. Our study aimed to highlight the features of online appointment systems for hospitals in Taiwan, where patients can visit outpatient departments without a referral. Methods: All hospitals online appointment systems were surveyed in October 2018. Features of first-visit registrations were analyzed and stratified according to the hospitals’ accreditation levels. Results: Of the 417 hospitals, 59.7% (249) had public online appointment systems. For first-visit patients, only 199 hospitals offered the option of making appointments online from 7 to 98 (mean 38.9) days prior to the appointment itself. Before appointments, 68 (34.2%) hospitals recommended specialties for patients to choose according to their symptoms, and only 11 (5.5%) had a function for sending messages to doctors. After appointments, 176 (88.4%) provided links to real-time monitoring of outpatient service progress. Conclusions: More than half of the hospitals in Taiwan have public online appointment systems. However, most of these systems simply fulfill the function of registration, and rarely take the opportunity to improve efficiency by gathering information regarding patients’ medical history or reasons for making the appointment.

In countries where the private clinics of physicians can be freely named, registering a clinic with a physician’s name is one way to make patients familiar with the physician. No previous study had investigated how clinics make use of this method of personal branding. Therefore, the current study analyzed 10,847 private physician Western medicine clinics in Taiwan. Of those clinics, 31.0% (n = 3363) were named with a physician’s full name, 8.9% (n = 960) with a surname, and 8.1% (n = 884) with a given name. The proportion of clinics registered with a physician’s name was lower in rural areas (37.3%) than in urban (48.5%) and suburban areas (49.2%), respectively. Among clinics with only one kind of specialist, a physician’s name was used most frequently in clinics of obstetrics and gynecology (64.9%), otorhinolaryngology (64.1%), and dermatology (63.4%). In Taiwan, fewer than half of clinics used a physician’s name as a brand. The sociocultural or strategic factors and real benefits of doing so could be further studied in the future for a better understanding of healthcare services management.

Local health centers (LHCs) play a key role in public health. Because it has now become popular to seek health information on the Internet, an effective website is indispensable to an LHC. Our study aimed to survey the official websites of LHCs in Taiwan with an evaluation framework. All 369 LHCs in Taiwan were surveyed in March 2018. The evaluation indicators included health information, online interactive services, technical features, institutional information, links to external resources, website management, the last updated time, and number of visitors. The indicators were stratified by the urbanization levels of the LHCs. In total, 98.0% (n = 360) of the LHCs had official websites. The majority (n = 241) of the websites were updated within the past 30 days, and most of the websites (n = 353) provided health information. However, the information provided varied considerably. Few LHCs (n = 31) provided online interactive services in terms of an online appointment function. In terms of providing online consultation services, rural LHCs outperformed suburban and urban LHCs (16.4% versus 14.5% and 6.0%, respectively). Most LHCs in Taiwan do not seem to take full advantage of the Internet, with their websites typically serving as static bulletin boards instead of new channels of communication. Further studies could focus on the effectiveness of these websites.

Understanding the topography of hospital safety culture is vital for developing, implementing, and monitoring the effectiveness of tailored safety programs. Since 2009, the Chinese version of the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire (SAQ-C) has been introduced and administered to providers in many Taiwanese hospitals. The percentage of SAQ respondents who demonstrate attitudinal agreement within each of the SAQ domains, the percent agreement (PA) score, is used worldwide as the main parameter of safety culture surveys. However, several limitations within PA scoring have been identified. Our study sought to improve scoring methodology and develop a new graph layout for cultural topography presentation. A total of 37,163 responses to a national SAQ-C administration involving 200 Taiwan hospitals were retrospectively analyzed. To understand the central tendency and spread of safety culture scores across all participating hospitals, the median and interquartile range (IQR) of individual respondent’s SAQ-C scores by its domain were calculated, plotted, and named “Jeong & Lee plot”. Because of space limitation, we showed teamwork domain only. Study results denote limitations in the current PA scoring scheme, suggest SAQ analysis modification, and introduce a visualization graph layout that can provide richer information about safety culture dissemination than that available from currently utilized tools.