Recently, although each ministry budget is decreasing, competitive fund for research and development (R&D) is increasing. I have introduced the latest general invitation of the fund for R&D, and pointed out some attentions one has to pay when writing a proposal. In addition, concerning national universities which are to be independent administrative institutions in the near future (from 2004), I have proposed the “improvement cycle” which considers evaluation as a positive approach for making a mechanism for their development.

 In this article, we describe the “genome-based medicine” as a new horizon of medicine driven by genome information and discuss crossover points genome-based medicine and medical informatics. And moreover, we focused on the disease model that is expected to be a new frontier in medical informatics. The disease model and simulation supports the “systems medicine” as system-level understanding of disease that is based on the comprehensive genomic data.

 Rapid innovation of information technology starts eliminating boundary between real world and cyber world. This paper discusses how such information technology, such as mixed reality, ubiquitous computing and pervasive computing, reconstructs clinical medicine. Introduction of mixed reality allows surgeons to refer various data through unified display during surgery, and changes education of surgical skills. The pervasive computing environment based on implanted sensors let patients to enjoy continuous treatments without visiting hospital.

 There are several approaches at improvement of hospital management, for instance, through improvement or rationalization of revenue and expenditure. In this study, we have tried to develop a system by which hospital management is improved using various data of medical information. Based on various statistical data such as the balance sheets according to diseases, we have tried to establish tactics, aiming at improvement or rationalization of medical services.

 The electric patient record (EPR) system is utilized to record the course of medical treatment, to count the consumption of resources such as drugs, medicines and materials, to analyze the critical pathway and manage the clinical outcome, and to optimize the medical pathway. All kinds of clinical data type are handled and every patient clinical record is stored in the clinical data repository. These EPR environments in the hospital are powerful tools to pave the way for the development of new medicines and to analyze the pharmacogenomical response to an individual patient in the post genome period. The data processing techniques such as a data mining technique and a online analytical processing technique are applied for the long-term archived CDR data, which fact is a new energy to create and produce the next generation’s bio-medical informatics in the era of EPR.

 The object of this study is to evaluate a decision support system on the Internet technology in general practitioner outpatient offices. The measurement is patients’ understanding level. The developed decision support system included simulation which was based on Weibull distribution. Fourteen mock patients tried to solve an examination referencing the system. We found that figures which represents a cohort and survival curves offer good understanding to them.

 In this article, an introduction of a department of Bioinformatics and Genomics is described. This new department has been established in the Graduate School of Information Science Nara Institute of Science and Technology in the April of 2002. An objective of the new department is educating and training the Bioinformatics/Genomics related knowledge and technology for the graduate school students. They are expected to become the specialists in this interdisciplinary field.

 [Background] This study clarified the social need for the new science of Clinical and Bioinformatic Engineering in Clinical Bioinformatics, which was begun as one of the unit projects to promote science and technology under the aegis of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology. [Methods] Those registering to attend a lecture titled “Introduction to clinical information engineering” were asked to complete a questionnaire survey. [Results] The stated reason for attending the lecture was for business research (67.6%), to obtain necessary knowledge (42.2%), out of interest (26.6%), and for research and development (12.5%). In total, 93.8% (120/128) agreed that it was necessary to develop a graduate school in this field. [Conclusion] There is a need for interdisciplinary, up-to-date education in this field for members of society.

 The purpose of healthcare system reform in Japan is to improve the transparency of healthcare, to improve the quality and safety of healthcare, and to advance the efficiency of the healthcare system. To achieve this, systematization of the healthcare system Information Technology (IT) is indispensable. And, it is now the national policy to apply IT to the reform of the healthcare system.

 However, the number of information engineers who bear this is insufficient, and the information processing organization that promotes it has not been sufficiently established in each medical institution to achieve this plan. Such is the problem of the plan for healthcare system reform.

 Therefore, the Japanese Association of Medical Informatics (JAMI) started a project to promote engineers who have the technology for medical information processing. And, 979 new Healthcare Information Technologists (Healthcare IT) started in November, 2003. A Healthcare IT is a professional who well understands the feature of healthcare, and is a person who has the knowledge, technical expertise, ability to be able to use and to offer medical information safely and effectively by using the best information processing technology. This is the definition of the Healthcare IT profession. Ability different from past medical professionals and information professionals is requested for new Healthcare ITs. It is an ability to understand the ethical issues involved with medical information system management and medical information processing. Moreover, the ability to Communicate, Coordinate and Collaborate, is essential for the Healthcare ITs.

 Presently, JAMI alone recognizes the necessity of this qualification. In addition, we should maintain the ability of recognized Healthcare IT corresponding to the change in the age of technological of progress, and execute continuous education in order to keep pace with advances in technology. Moreover, it is necessary to make an effort to create a national qualification in order to ensure high standards for long term.