抄録
Recently, the unbalance between the demand for medical and health care and the supply of medical resources has produced serious social problems in Japan.
In order to realize an ideal and comprehensive medicine available to anyone at anytime and anywhere even under the limited medical resources, the most useful solution is to organize a medical and health care system by information network.
In the planning of such a medical information system, not only application of system sciences and biomedical engineering but also establishment of philosophy, purposes and evaluation criteria are required in the interdisciplinary analysis of current status on medical care.
The realization of a medical information system will bring both social merits and demerits in future.
As main merits, people's benefits derived from comprehensive medicine, resolution of the problems on emergency medical care and doctorless remote areas, information services for medical doctors, development of medical sciences and collection of data on medical and health care policy may be expected.
On the other hand, enormous medical care cost and fear of controlled society will be main demerits.
Technological assessment will be indispensably necessary for promoting the policy on the medical information system.
