Abstract
Fostering a cooperative society between family physicians and specialists will be a key to improve the community healthcare. To accomplish this. however, may not be a simple story in Japan, since most of the clinicians working at private clinics have been educated as specialists of some disciplines and are sometimes competitors with each other. Because of the difficulty of preserving the quality of social insurance, the cost-effectiveness of healthcare system has been pursued and the importance of family medicine was recognized. And the primary care has become one of the key educational subjects. The communication system among family physicians and specialists to support the above cooperative society should also be a fundamental infrastructure in future, however, it is rather difficult to create such a system at present since most of the clinics and hospitals have computer systems of their own which were developed without the concept of community healthcare. In this paper we will describe about our project to develop such a communication system which is started this April.2001at Mie prefecture. It is stated that keeping privacy of each clinic and a patient has the crucial importance to get the approval to the development of the system.
