The purpose of this study is to clarify whether the “Nursing Summary Data Items Set” can be applied to a hospital information system when nursing record is computerized and the Nursing Summary Creation System is introduced. In so doing, we have conducted a self-administered questionnaire study on 295 hospital ward managers of university hospitals and non-university hospitals as to whether the data item information are recorded, using the “Nursing Summary Data Items Set” created by the Nursing Summary Network Study Group. 171 participants with valid answers were used for the analysis among 243 respondents. As a result, it was found that 80–90% of data item information categorized into patient attributes and medical care information were recorded. On the other hand, the percentage of patient & family guidance/welfare services/home-care oriented information being recorded was approximately 40%. Moreover, as a result of separating the hospitals into university hospital group and non-university hospital group to examine their connections with the percentage of recording, significant differences were confirmed in 28 items, and showed that the percentage of recording was higher with non-university hospital group in all aspects.

 In Japan, a large university hospital usually has a problem of crowding at an outpatient clinic. It is so difficult to get the continuous information of crowding at a glance that we made a resolution by a server client system on the Hospital Information System (HIS). This system is new in the aspect where the location of patients at outpatient clinic is reconstructed only by the logs on the HIS. Since HIS is based on order-entry, the time of order indicates that the patient is there. We implemented and assessed the system at the outpatient clinic of Gunma University Hospital. An analysis of waiting time and the crowding patterns at each weekday was matched exactly with the simultaneous inspection analysis. The results show that our system is effective to visualize the crowding of the outpatient clinic continuously so that we can resolve the problem timely. To analyze the human behavior using log files on the online computer system has a benefit for end users because they do not need of any extra key entries, and may open a new field in the hospital management and patient behavioral sciences.

 It is more than 30 years since the first experiment of telemedicine was performed in Japan. Since then, there have been various surveys in regard to technological aspect, but the number of consultations which were carried out in real clinical setting was not known. In this study, a survey was made by questionnaire in the field of tele-radiology, tele-pathology, tele-consultation in ophthalmology and endoscopic surgery. The result showed that the number of cases were still small and the practices of telemedicine were supported by government or local government fund. This means that Japanese telemedicine is not yet regarded as an ordinary medical procedure. It is important to assess the telemedicine again in Japanese medical environment and to form a social consensus how to share the cost of telemedicine among government, medical institutions and patients.

 A telemedicine system to enable collaboration through the Internet among doctors or dentists was developed. This new developed Medical Remote Conference Networking System was named M-Net. M-Net consists of Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL, PHP and Java. It functions as real-time collaboration system with images.

 The purpose of this study was its trail use in the dental field.

 The results showed that this system was able to be performed without huge investment to a hard side for M-Net users due to using WWW browser software through the Internet.

 It is concluded that M-Net is very useful in the dental field. M-Net in the dental field will be more improved by the user’s opinion and then M-Net in the medical field will be trialed.

 For the reduction in waiting time and the improvement in the efficiency of the medical service, we studied difference of waiting time, etc. by diseases. We investigated the waiting time (registration time to appointment time), the length of stay (registration to the end of the medical treatment), and the treatment time (appointment time to the end). The length of stay and the treatment time of cataract were about 40 minutes longer than those of postoperative patients. In all cases but ocular fundus disease, new patients came earlier than repeat patients. In case of ocular fundus disease, repeat patients came about 9 minutes earlier than new patients. Diabetes mellitus (DM) patients were accepted 12 minutes before the appointment time. It is the latest in all diseases. Moreover, the treatment time of DM is 13 minutes longer than the others. The average treatment time of glaucoma is 29 minutes and the shortest. The average waiting time of corneoconjunctival disease is 10 minutes shorter than the others. In this analysis, we found the waiting time, etc. of each disease has unique feature according to scheduled exam and disease itself. We think that the study is useful to set up the appointment time and reduce the claims.

 A method of paired comparison is generally used for decision-making. This paper describes a new Dematel method improved to determine the order of priority of many factors. An indirect degree of importance could be evaluated by this method expanding the two steps comparison to the infinite steps. This study was carried out by the analysis of data from the questionnaire to physicians about the blood chemical parameters in liver dysfunctions.

 Objective: The Internet literacy of Japanese medical doctors (MDs) is investigated in this study.

 Subjects and Methods: A survey was made by mail to 60,000 medical doctors in Japan. The number of respondents was 14,105 (response rate 23.5%).

 Results: The ratio of medical doctors having PCs was relatively high. The access to Internet was not good as the MD was elder. The access place of salaried physician for Internet was 50 : 50 between at home and at workplace, and that of self-employed physician was higher at home than at workplace. MDs obtain medical information through Internet by 80%. Interactive communication between MDs and patients was done by 20%.

 The editorial team will comment alternatively how to produce more scientific papers with high quality about medical informatics. I will describe typical methods for scientific research firstly. There may be some papers of medical informatics which are difficult to be described in the orthodox format. But I think it is important to know the characteristics of traditional method before we will discuss the new one. Especially I want you to understand various biases in data which are gathered in unsuitable methods. I will show you a basic structure for scientific papers lastly.