The P2P network was born due to the recent rapid spread of internet. In the P2P network, data are exchanged directly between peers' personal computers. The P2P network is different from the client/server-type network which is mainly used presently.
 The research and development of the medical information sharing using the P2P network has been conducted in Asahikawa Research Center, NICT for three years. The research of the P2P network system, high-speed searching technology of medical information, and security technology for privacy protection has been performed thus far.
 The medical information sharing system using a P2P network was developed based on the results of these research. A basic evaluation on the response to information searching and on the data acquisition time was done. Also the total system was evaluated by the doctors at 16 facilities in Hokkaido.
 Majority of the doctors was satisfied with the information searching time and usefullness of the total system. A medical information sharing system using a P2P network is promising for telemedicine.

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 The Internet gives us easy way to get more information in the world, but it is difficult to guarantee quality of information on the Web. However, people want high-quality information with rapidity. For this demand a scheme that yields information effectively by professionals is needed. In this paper we introduce an editing support system for medical information, which we developed. The system has three features to support collaborative works when professionals edit documents, such as articles for magazines, papers, and protocols together. One is “data reconstitution” that enables users to edit asynchronously at a distance. The second is “adaptive representation” that makes different representation for user classes. The last is “access control” that protects data from miss operation and maintains the independency of data. Using this system we have operate cancer information publication on the Web since October 2003. Now we provide treatment information based on PDQ^®(Physician Data Query from National Cancer Institute)^※1, drug information, clinical trial information, and treatment result information. Each item of content is and will be stored into database independently and users who have responsibility for each item of content only edit or update each database and coordination between different specialists is virtually not needed. Therefore, our system enables editors to update database asynchronously. Furthermore, it provides up-to-date medical information based on database coalition effectively.

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 Some criticisms, such as input difficulty, security, and so on, have been pointed out as flaws in systems of electronic medical records. We have been long engaged in development of the pen-based interface to improve these flaws and promote the use of electronic medical records. However, the evaluation of effectiveness of this interface has not been performed thoroughly enough yet. We did conduct a survey using questionnaires, which asked 244 people about this interface in seminar. Responses were obtained from 82 people. Of these people, 67(81.7%) agreed that the assistant functions in this interface were useful. Particularly, the pen ID function scored higher than all other assistant functions. As well, 57(69.5%) people answered that our pen-based interface would promote the use of electronic medical records. Wilcoxon's signed ranks test showed that the pen-based interface is significantly easier to use than a keyboard interface, especially for outpatient consultation (p<0.01). It turned out that most of the respondents expected that the pen-based interface could have potential to improve shortcomings in the systems of electronic medical records. These results suggest that the pen-based interface will be effective in popularizing electronic medical records.

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