Japanese EMRs and IT in Medicine: Expansion, Integration, and Reuse of Data

OBJECTIVES: The prevalence of electronic medical record in Japan varies according to the size of the hospital which is 62.5% in major hospitals, 21.7% in medium, 9.1% in small size hospitals, and 16.5% in clinics. The complete paperless system is very limited, though some major hospitals are aiming at this system. Several regional network systems which connect different platforms of EMRs, have been developing in many districts, while the final picture of a regional network has not been clearly proposed. To develop a whole electronic health record or personal health records system from the regional network data, we have several obstacles to overcome such as standardization, a privacy act, unique national health number. METHODS: Some experimental trials have just been started. The reuse of the accumulated data has also just been initiated. We exploited text mining systems (term frequency-inverse document frequency method) to find similar cases and auto-audit Japanese diagnosis related group (DRG) coding by using discharge summaries. RESULTS: The same or even a more extreme phenomenon of huge data accumulation is occurring in genetic research and confluence of multi-disciplines of informatics is the next step, which has an enormous accumulation of data and discoveries of the relations beyond the dimension of each informatics. CONCLUSIONS: We need another approach to science apart from the conventional method, and data-driven approach with data mining techniques must be brought in for each field. Informaticians have new important roles as coordinators to link up numerous phenomena over dimensions.