Information technology(IT) has begun to pervade all aspects of daily life, including the medical field. With the increased efficiency comes the potential for adverse social effects. The advent of electronic medical charts raises a host of issues including loss of medical privacy. Especially for HIV/AIDS patients, ensuring the protection of personal information is a serious problem.
 This paper introduces the Reggie system as a case study. Reggie is the personal information network system for San Francisco HIV/AIDS patients. Project Reggie started in 1995. At that time, many patients felt shame, anxiety, and annoyance at being placed into the system. Now, with the strengthening of legal privacy protections and the change in their social environment, ninety percent of HIV/AIDS patients in San Francisco have joined the Reggie system.
 Reggie is the system for HIV/AIDS patients themselves, because they have total control over access to their personal information. They have their own secret codes that they can give out to anyone whom they choose to share their personal medical information with. No doctor can access the information without the code.

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 Due to patent problems surrounding the JPEG which is currently the standard imaging format for the Internet, the JPEG 2000 has been attracting interest as an alternative. We compared their imaging formats in standard imaging(SMPTE) and endoscopic imaging through assessment of peak signal noise ratios(PSNR). In the same compression ratio, our results showed that, on the whole, the JPEG 2000 had 50% better compression efficacy while the decline in image quality was minimal. We believe the JPEG 2000 provides an efficient imaging format for medical examination and treatment in the near future.

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 There are many researches on patient satisfaction in Japan in the last decade and we have to utilize the information from the researches effectively. Very few attempts have been made at collecting data from more than one institution. The purpose of this study is to fill in this gap and to examine the differences in the degree of outpatient satisfaction and the factors which affect outpatient satisfaction depending on hospital types classified by bed size and function. The results indicated that factors such as the evaluation of the doctor, the evaluation of the amenity services, perceived change in health had a statistical y significant effect on patient satisfaction among all the types of the hospitals. The standardized regression coefficient of the evaluation of the doctor was the highest in all the types of hospitals. Moreover, in an analysis of the university hospitals, patient satisfaction was affected by further factors in addition to the three factors mentioned above. Lower patient satisfaction was associated with younger age, longer waiting time, and a longer span of continuous hospital visits. University hospitals and large-scale hospitals need to take various measures such as decreasing the waiting time and creating a comfortable environment to spend the waiting time in order to improve medical service quality for patients.

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 In order to support the 8020 Activities and the Kenkonippon 21 effectively and efficiently, information service for patients by Information Technology(IT) installation is significant and indispensable. Therefore, we developed and evaluated a prototype of the 8020 Support Information System. In this paper, we show the purposes, developmental policies, and contents of this system. And we discuss subjects and problems of development and operation from the results of the evaluation tests.

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 Objective: The objective of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of using the text mining and other document search systems for the development of evidenced-based clinical practice guideline.
 Methods: We arranged document databases for searches, exercises and adequate documents to evaluate these systems. We used the precision and recall rate as evaluation criteria.
 Results: By using the text mining system, we achieved a high precision on the clinical question for the guideline, while keeping a high recall rate. By using the similar document search systems, we achieved a good result with the dimension reduced systems.
 Conclusion: We revealed that the text mining and similar document search system were useful for developing a clinical practice guideline based on the evidence-based medicine. We could achieve high precision and recall rate through these systems. Above all, searches on the exercise that has a limited condition had an excellent result.

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