Abstract
Many patients with hematological malignancies have to travel long distances because there are few hospitals that perform the testing they need. Moreover, patients hesitate to use public transportation because of the infection risk. We extracted the home addresses of patients with hematological malignancies from a data warehouse of electronic medical records, made a map for visualizing that data using Google Earth Pro and Batch Geo, and estimated the patients' transportation costs. Our sample consisted of 90 patients hospitalized in the hematology division of the Teikyo University Chiba Medical Center from March 2009 to March 2011 (average age of 64). Of the patients surveyed, 33% had a round trip to the hospital of more than 50 km, and 7% had to travel over 100km. It was also estimated that round-trip transportation costs would exceed 10,000 JPY (120 USD) for 47% of the patients surveyed, with an average cost of 20,957 JPY (251 USD).
