Background: Social media advertising has become increasingly influential in recent years. Because Facebook has the most active users worldwide, many hospitals in Taiwan have created official Facebook fan pages. Our study was to present an overview of official Facebook fan pages of hospitals in Taiwan. Methods: All 417 hospitals were surveyed about their use of Facebook fan pages in December 2017. The last update time, posts in the past 30 days, number of “Likes”, and other features were analyzed and stratified according to the accreditation statuses of the hospitals. Results: In Taiwan, only 51.1% (n = 213) of the hospitals had an official Facebook fan page. Among these hospitals, 71.8% (n = 153) had updated their pages in the past 30 days, although 89.2% (n = 190) provided online interactions. Academic medical centers tended to have more “Likes” than regional and local community hospitals (on average 5947.4, 2644.8, and 1548.0, respectively). Conclusions: In spite of the popularity of Facebook among the general population, most hospitals in Taiwan do not seem to make good use of this kind of social media. The reasons for the use and nonuse of Facebook on the part of both hospitals and patients deserve further investigation.

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.

Background: The Patient Autonomy Act was implemented in Taiwan on 6 January 2019. It is the first patient-oriented act in Taiwan, and also the first special act to completely protect patient autonomy in Asia. Our study aimed to investigate the web resources citizens were able to access on the eve of the implementation of the Patient Autonomy Act in Taiwan. Methods: Patient Autonomy Act-related web resources were searched for by entering 10 related terms individually into the Google search engine in January 2019 and again in April 2019. Search activity data were analyzed using Google Trends. Results: “Advance care planning” and “advance decision” were the most relevant keywords for finding information about the Patient Autonomy Act on the eve of the act’s implementation in Taiwan. The main online information sources were non-governmental websites including news sites and online magazines. The related search volume only increased on the eve of implementation. Conclusions: Even though the Patient Autonomy Act was first published three years before its implementation, the related search volume only increased on the eve of its implementation. Therefore, whether the three-year buffer between its publication and implementation was necessary requires further investigation.

It has been a significant issue to satisfy the rapidly growing data traffic with the limited wireless radio resources. Licensed-assisted access to unlicensed spectrum (e.g., LAA) brings hope for the service provider (SP) to mitigate the deficiency of radio resources. This work contributes on designing a pricing model in a licensed and unlicensed coexisting network, modelled as a two-sided market with content providers (CPs) and end users (EUs) at the SP's two sides. A premium content delivery deal is further designed via the optimal auction in order to efficiently allocate the scarce radio resources for the CPs with higher traffic load and QoS requirement. Thus, the SP and CPs form a prioritized spectrum game, and the SP and EUs form a radio access subscription game. By backward induction, we derive the basic delivery price and the premium delivery price to CPs, the reservation price, and the LTE-only and LAA subscription prices to EUs. Analysis shows that all players benefit from the premium delivery deal and co-existence of unlicensed LTE. When the unlicensed spectrum becomes reliable, all players' payoffs and the subscription ratio increase. In addition, the impact of the subsidies and technology heterogeneity are also addressed in this article.

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication is a promising concept used to improve user experience and enhance resource utilization in cellular networks, enabling two close-by D2D devices to establish a direct local link and bypass a base station. The proximity of two D2D devices allows for high data rate, low latency, and low energy consumption. D2D communication for proximity-based services (ProSe) is one of the most popular issues discussed in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). D2D devices require to discover each other (i.e. D2D discovery) before D2D communication. It can be applied to various important fields such as the environment and habitat monitoring, disaster management, and emergency response. In this work, we consider D2D communication is adopted for Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices for local operation. These devices may be randomly deployed and expose to uncontrolled, harsh and hostile environments. Thus, energy-harvesting technology is considered to enable devices to gather energy from the ambient sources and recharge their batteries. We investigate the constraints of an LTE-A system to serve energy-harvesting D2D devices. We develop a low complexity algorithm for D2D discovery resource allocation. Moreover, Sleep-Coordinative Mechanism (SCM) and Saving-before-Activity Mechanism (SBA) are proposed to realize energy-harvesting D2D discovery under the resource and energy constraints. Simulation results show that the combination of SCM and SBA effectively achieves almost 100% discovery rate with fewer time slots and lower energy consumption.