This study evaluates a business model designed to enable efficient marketing for lipid-lowering drugs. Rising pharmaceutical marketing costs in the U.S. contribute to increasing drug prices. Our model quantifies customer insights from physician behavior and surveys to support targeted strategies. Analysis of cardiology website data categorized viewers into six groups, followed by a survey on lipid management practices. Senior cardiologists specializing in catheter treatments showed high interest in the study drug and treated complex patients. They preferred convenient information sources like medical sites over academic conferences. This model aims to reduce marketing costs and help control drug prices.

The collection, organization, and analysis of data in public health and welfare administration requires significant effort. This study investigates the potential for automating long-term care certification decisions under Japan's long-term care insurance system using GPT-4o, a large language model capable of analyzing unstructured data such as physician reports and case notes. We developed a custom GPT model, trained on official long-term care certification casebooks, to simulate the secondary decisions made by the certification committee.

Experimental results showed that the model achieved a high level of accuracy, particularly in cases where the care level changed significantly. The model also showed a 90% concordance with physicians' assessments, indicating its potential to replicate medical reasoning.

These findings suggest that automated judgment using large language models has the potential to improve the efficiency of the long-term care certification process.

Japan's new Community Health Care Vision, released in December 2024, aims to address healthcare delivery challenges comprehensively through 2040, encompassing inpatient, outpatient, home-based care, and long-term care coordination. However, this expanded scope raises concerns about the increasing complexity of accurately assessing regional healthcare systems. To aid in understanding this current situation, this study attempted to develop a novel metric for describing and analyzing inpatient and home-based service provision in secondary healthcare areas using the Standardized Claim Ratio (SCR) and principal component analysis (PCA). The results organized patterns of interrelationships and regional disparities indicated by SCRs for various services. Two principal components were extracted as key integrated axes: the first representing the direction of healthcare provision, and the second indicating the overall volume of inpatient care. Furthermore, secondary healthcare areas were categorized based on these new metrics, and their associations with structural elements of regional healthcare systems and healthcare outcomes were exploratorily examined. The approach proposed in this study is suggested to be a potential tool for comprehensively capturing and structurally describing/analyzing complex healthcare delivery situations.

As the role of nurses diversifies, it has become increasingly difficult for nursing managers to manage without a business perspective, given the diverse roles and significant challenges they face. In addition, the environment surrounding nurses is also changing significantly. Is the career development and education system that we have been doing so far sufficient?

In this regard, although there are differences between facilities in Korea, they have a career that includes the work content, authority, and incentives to utilize the abilities of advanced practice nurses (APNs), and at the same time, they are also involved in hospital management.

The purpose of this study is to construct a career development model for nurses and at the same time to develop an educational program to train nursing managers (future nursing managers).

In light of the current situation and challenges in Japan, we decided to focus on the advanced initiatives of the South Korean nursing system, such as appointing nursing managers as hospital administrators, as well as educational programs for the development of nursing management leaders, and to advance towards international comparative research.

This paper examines the current situation and challenges of nurse career development from a comparison between Japan and Korea.

As Japan faces a declining birthrate and aging population, there is an urgent need to resolve social issues such as elderly care and loneliness and isolation, and the emergence of new entrepreneurs is anticipated. Services and technologies originating in Japan can be expanded to overseas markets as unique senior businesses. Entrepreneurship in the nursing care field has the potential to provide new value by providing opportunities to create new services and establish independent businesses. However, research on the entrepreneurial will of care workers is limited, and in particular the differences by gender and the relationship with psychological factors have not been fully elucidated. This study focuses on the entrepreneurial will of female care workers and aims to clarify the relationship between internal factors such as self-efficacy and grit and external factors such as managerial positions and wages through a comparison with men.

Shared Decision Making (SDM) has garnered attention within the medical community. To disseminate SDM, the role of pharmaceutical companies, which conduct seminars, is also considered to be substantial. This study examined the measures that pharmaceutical companies can implement to contribute to SDM, with a focus on the initial treatment of breast cancer.

A survey of 200 patients found that the primary sources of information influencing SDM were their physicians, online resources, and hospital materials. Additionally, patient health literacy and the ease with which they can communicate with their physicians were suggested as factors that affect SDM.

Considering these findings, pharmaceutical companies could consider providing SDM support tools, organizing and facilitating access to reliable information about specific treatment options, sharing SDM experiences, and supporting efforts to improve patients' health literacy and physicians' communication skills. These programs would contribute to patient-centric healthcare pharmaceutical companies are promoting.

This paper analyzes the impact of public hospitals on the safety net in community health care from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. In particular, the relationship between the existence of public hospitals and mortality from COVID-19 was examined through regression analysis. We show that the higher the proportion of public hospitals in a region, the lower the mortality rate from COVID-19. This result implies that public hospitals have a regional safety net for infectious diseases. Then, we examine the relationship between the safety net for infectious diseases of public hospitals, subsidies to public hospitals, and public hospital reform. We show that amount of subsidies is unrelated to the safety-net function, whereas the function of public hospitals tends to be weaker where privatization is proactive.

Pediatricians often work long hours, making it challenging to implement physician workstyle reforms. This study surveyed pediatric department heads at hospitals nationwide to assess the progress of workstyle reforms and hospital attributes. Questionnaires were sent to 835 hospitals, with valid responses from 232 department heads. Many items were reported as "already implemented." However, less than 70% had implemented "shift-based work schedules," "work flexibility for male physicians with childcare responsibilities," and "plans to achieve compliance with B-level or collaborative B-level standards." Physicians reporting slow progress were significantly more likely to work at national or public university hospitals and less likely at private hospitals. Additionally, 49.6% of respondents believed reforms would lower the quality and safety of healthcare, exceeding those who thought it would improve. Despite progress in workstyle reforms, concerns remain about their potential negative impact on medical care quality and safety.

To clarify the relationship between the guidance of level 0 incident reporting behavior and the medical safety climate of nursing managers working at Advanced treatment hospitals, a cross-sectional study was conducted using an anonymous self-administered questionnaire. The questions included the presence or absence of guidance on level 0 incident reporting behavior, basic attributes, and scores using the Medical Safety Climate Scale. The valid response rate was 82. 2%, and 84.9% of respondents reported receiving guidance on level 0 incident reporting behavior. No significant differences were found between the presence or absence of guidance and basic attributes. However, significant differences were observed in the Medical Safety Culture Scale scores for Factor 1: Free Communication (p=0. 002) and Factor 2: Continuous Improvement (p=0. 048) when guidance was provided. Additionally, significant differences were found in four items of Factor 1 and one item of Factor 2. Significant differences were also observed between basic attributes and Factor 1 (years in position, p=0. 035) and Factor 2 (years in department, p=0. 014).

A narrative review was conducted on the use and sharing of medication history. The results indicated that such records are mainly created by pharmacists in insurance pharmacies and contribute to enhancing their expertise. The entries include not only prescription details but also patient information obtained through interviews, interpreted through pharmacists' professional judgment. These records are shared with prescribing institutions and patients, often via medication handbooks, serving as a valuable source of drug-related information.

This study investigated the number of work-related accidents that occurred in medical institutions over a three-year period from 2019 to 2021. In all three years, the number of accidents caused by “excessive physical strain” and “slips, trips, and falls” remained at a high level. The number of work-related accidents varied significantly by time of day, and one contributing factor was considered to be the shortage of nursing staff relative to the workload. Furthermore, the spread of the novel coronavirus infection led to an increase in the number of work-related accidents related to the infection in 2020. However, despite the continued increase in the number of positive cases nationwide in 2021, the number of work-related accidents caused by the novel coronavirus infection decreased significantly. Factors contributing to this include strained medical resources, disruptions to work, dissatisfaction with leave systems, insufficient awareness of the necessity of isolation due to asymptomatic infections, and an increase in cases where the connection to work could not be confirmed, such as infections within households. Healthcare workers are exposed to a variety of occupational hazards. As the Japanese government promotes reforms to working conditions, it is also important that healthcare workers who have suffered work-related accidents receive appropriate compensation.

<Background> The diversification of user needs in recent years has led to an increase in the number of home-visit nursing stations that provide uninsured services. However, these services remain largely unknown. Therefore, we aimed to explore the administrators' perspectives on pricing for these services.

<Methods> Managers of home-visit nursing stations in Japan were interviewed about uninsured services. The audio data were transcribed verbatim, and the narratives related to pricing were thematically categorized.

<Results> Twelve were interviewed (response ratio: 15.6%). The prices for uninsured services ranged from 0 to 20,000 yen. Pricing decisions were based on factors such as “Pricing aligned with the system” and “Pricing considering the user's burden”. However, factors like “Guilt over pricing” and “Insufficient service provision systems” led to “Modest awareness and publicity”.

<Conclusions> A pricing system that balances supply and demand, along with a service framework that facilitates easier access to uninsured services, is needed.