Diagnosis procedure combination(DPC) system, that promotes an incentive to shortening of hospital days, often induces pressure of work in hospital employee. The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of DPC on the job satisfaction level of nurses working in advanced treatment hospital called “hospital A”.
 The obtained data were analyzed using one-way analysis of variance and Student’s t-test. As the result, the job satisfaction level of nurses affected by DPC was significantly low compared with that of nurses who were not affected by DPC. In comparison of items related to job satisfaction scale, the same results were shown in salary and doctor-nurse interaction. These data indicated that the pressure of work caused by introduction of DPC has the negative effect on satisfaction level of nursing staff. It is suggested that the proper understanding of this issue leads to improvement of nurses’ work environment.

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 The development and construction of an electronic medical record system requires a considerable work amount.
 The present study sets forth, as a case study, the development process launched in January of 2004 at Nagoya City University Hospital. It describes the one year and three months’ process where the electronic medical record system went on stream. In the study, in order to make analogous classification about the 10 working committees for the development such as Electronic Medical Record System Committee, In/outpatient and Ward Working Committee, Nurse Working Committee, etc, a quantitative analytical approach to various indicators of the committees based on cluster analysis method was carried out. These indicators include the number of items considered, of man-days involved, of meeting held and of hours involved. As a result, it was suggested that adopting three large group committees for the 10 working committees was useful. The first group committee is directly involved in treatment, the second is indirectly involved in treatment, and the last is involved in specialized technology and LAN. In each of the 10 working committees, there was overlapping in the following indicators such as consideration items (the total number; 1,464), consideration hours (the total hours; 1219.5), working committee participants (the total number; 5424) and meeting times (the total number; 502). And by adopting the three large group committees, it was suggested that the total reduction ratio of each indicator was 18.0%, 22.5%, 25.3% and 23.5%, respectively. This kind of quantitative analytical approach to an electronic medical record system, even viewed in light of the efficiency of its system development, can be taken to yield significant results.

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 To protect against lip trauma with wind instruments, music splints that cover the sharp edges of anterior teeth are often manufactured by dentists. These custom splints are cast with dental auto polymerizing resin on players’ labial tooth surfaces with reference to their lower dental arch. It is well known that the tone quality is changed by installing music splints.
 We recorded two types of trumpet sounds such as long tones (B♭) with and without a splint, respectively, by a professional trumpet player in an anechoic room. We examined the differences of these sounds with single-blind recognition tests. After fast Fourier transform, the higher harmonics were observed more in the sound with a music splint than without it. Furthermore, using the digital filtering technique, we confirmed that the subjects can recognize the differences in high frequency sound with their native ears.

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 Although the cellular phone shows the high diffusion rate, many hospitals are asking for turning of a subscriber uniformly. Since the information about electromagnetic interference (EMI) with medical electric devices, especially with artificial cardiac pacemakers is known widely, patients and visitors follow it. However, for patients admitted for medium to long periods of time, switching off their cellular phone means shutting down an important route of communication. Allowing cellular phone use is an easy way to reduce inpatient isolation stress. The request for permission of cellular phone use is strong from the viewpoint of patient service. In this paper, while the limit of the safety about use of a cellular phone is shown from the knowledge acquired until now, the notes, technique, procedure, and three examples on which cellular phone use is permitted in restricted area are shown. For safe use of mobile communications in medical institutions, we must solve the following problems.
 (1) Prevention of EMI with medical electric devices by the electromagnetic waves emitted by cellular phones
 (2) Prevention of noise caused by people talking on telephones
 (3) Prevention of accidents caused by lack of at entiveness of operators of cellular phones

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 “Electronic Patient Record (EPR) Laboratory” is a software system developed at Department of Health Informatics, Kawasaki University of Medical Welfare. The system has been developed to provide students with education that meets the current demands for skilled personnel in hospitals. The system aims to assist students to acquire knowledge and skills in managing EPR systems in hospitals. The features included are 1) basic functionalities as an EPR system; 2) computer assisted learning; and 3) computer assisted development of teaching materials. In the learning mode, the students may learn about patient flow in a hospital, may read explanatory description of each subject, may practice how to operate an EPR system, and may undergo self-evaluating tests. Questionnaire survey on the students indicated usefulness of the system for learning structure of hospitals and EPR management.

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 We have investigated the technique to improve security on Local Area Network(LAN) in our hospital without expensive software repair of hospital information system. As a result, we found the Virtual Private Network function which is part of the operating system on the hospital terminal provides the required environment.
 For a verification, we have introduced a dual Xeon 2.4GHz cpu system, which is much lower than HIS system improvement costs, and confirmed the network bandwidth is approximately 100 Mbps, which is equivalent to the fast Ethernet. Furthermore, the response time of the HIS application is not influenced as much as network bandwidth decrease, since the data transfer time is small comparing to time to query database or to display the information.
 We think future hospital information system should be constructed on VPN or IPsec environment to handle the data consistency and security.

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