The importance of an intranet system to provide simultaneous information sharing and security has been growing in hospital management recently. However, it is difficult to realize an intranet system because networks for most hospitals consist of an intranet separated from a medical information network. Therefore, in this paper, we propose in a system model to realize an intranet system. The proposed system model consists of the following components. 1. Seamless network composition building an information sharing system between a medical information network and an intranet. 2. Security mechanism to defend against intrusion from the outside controlled by a firewall and real-time monitoring. 3. Management policy for information asset management prioritized by importance and conditions of use into three categories. 4. Seamless centralized information sharing system such as groupware, a file server, and others. This system model can defend against intrusion from the outside and provide advanced security to maintain the confidentiality of patients’ personal information. As a result of having introduced an intranet system based on the proposed system model in our hospital, the use of the information sharing system will be dramatically advanced and, therefore, possible to record incident responses for threats from the outside. The proposed system model has been confirmed to be effective, and an intranet system for hospitals to realize both seamless information sharing and security simultaneously has been successfully built.

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 Appropriate management of medical equipment is indispensable for accurate diagnosis and treatment, prevention of medical accidents, and maintaining security. Therefore, we attempted to construct a safety management system for medical equipment by using an RFID tag and a PDA which support management of maintenance inspection, and alibi (location search and tracking) of medical equipment.
 For this purpose, we collected information about the present condition and management of medical equipment. The design of our system was conducted referring the information gathered. In our system, an RFID tag (frequency band =13.56MHz) is utilized in the environment of a wireless LAN in the medical institution.
 Furthermore, it is possible that this system can improve safety management of medical equipment by obtaining more detailed information about the operating conditions of equipment based upon the construction of a medical equipment database.
 We constructed a small-sized system in a collaborating hospital and evaluated the function of the system. Our results suggest that this system might be useful for the management of medical equipment.

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 This paper presents a cluster analysis method for multidimensional time-series data of laboratory tests. Our method represents the time series of test results as trajectories in multidimensional space, and compares their structural similarity by using the multiscale comparison technique. It enables us to find the part-to-part correspondences between two trajectories, while taking into account the relationships between different tests. The resultant dissimilarity can be further used with clustering algorithms, for finding the groups of similar cases. The method was applied to the cluster analysis of Albumin-Platelet data in chronic hepatitis patients, and could form interesting groups of cases that have high correspondence to their fibrotic stages.

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 At Otsuka Hospital, injection orders were hand-written and the dosage and injection rate was easily adjusted according to patients’ condition. However, the introduction of Fujitsu’s Integrated Hospital Information System(IHIS) made this adjustment complicated. As the IHIS was programmed to link the orders to medical charges, changing the dosage, injection rate as well as quitting and/or re-administering the drugs required additional new orders. For these reasons, the introduction of IHIS created a lot of confusions. Each and every injection adjustments required new orders. It also reduced the quality of hospital service. To make injection rate adjustment as easy as the previous hand-written style, we have made a new ordering system, which requires only the injection content and the administering rate to order. In this system, injection orders became independent of medical charges, allowing prompt adjustment of injection rate according to the patients’ condition. We have improved the IHIS to became a more safe and adjustable system.

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 We continues to improve the quality of our facilities to make hospital stays more comfortable for inpatients. We examined the introduction of a VOD(Video On Demand) service, a broadband service including video contents, internet access and games. Through questionnaires and usage logs, we analyzed how 50 inpatients used the system.
 We found that overall, 70% of system usage was for watching TV programs, with on-demand movies and games used only rarely.
 However, the VOD service is of interest to patients under 40, of whom 60% said that they would enjoy the extra content and features. Patients over 60, however, said that they were likely to use the system only for television.

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 In order to add new order entry functions to the current hospital information system, modification of an existing “electronic comment” function is successfully adapted. The electronic comment function was originally intended to leave a memorandum sheet or send a referral letter on the electronic patient record, and routinely used by physicians. By applying the same interface, a screen of the new order entry can now be developed in a short time (usually a week or two), eliminating time-consuming cycles of prototype development as well as the user education.

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