Background: The use of local nursing language in hospitals, rather than standardized language, is the biggest problem in implementing nursing information systems. That is one of the reasons why nursing information systems are not widely used in comparison with other hospital information systems in Japan.
 Objective: The aim of this study was to devise a tool and evaluate it, which could be easily used by nurses to find standardized nursing terms from their local nursing vocabulary.
 Design: The authors compared the accuracy and length of time required both the tool and manual matching using 28 test pairs of local terms and standardized terms.
 Results: Using the tool, 26 out of 28 items were matched in two minutes compared with manual matching, in which 27 out of 28 items were matched in 60 minutes.
 Conclusion: The tool took much less time for matching. The accuracy of the matching results was marginally lower than the manual matching. However, the authors think it could be improved by adding some synonyms to the database.

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 Referral letter is very useful tool for medical collaboration among clinics or between hospital and staff. However, the collaboration is based on hand-carry of referral letter by the patients. Hand-carry takes much times and the patient may lose the referral letter. Above risks/ troubles will be avoided by electronic referral letter. Also, quantity and quality of electronic referral letter are improved drastically. As electronic referral letter is the private data, we must constitute the secure system. In this system, referral letter is transferred by XML and encryptionalized.
 The patient data is defended from menace of tapping and tamper. Now, we have finished simulation for communication among virtual clinics set up in campus of Tokai University and started clinical trials. Further, we are planning to improve the system.

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 Data saved in hospital information systems (HISs) must be utilized for the management of hospitals. Income data calculated using the diagnosis procedure combination (DPC) payment system could make it easier to analyze the income of a hospital. Our purpose is to develop analysis procedures for the simple visualization of hospitals’ market shares. A patient share map is also drawn to enable the simple visualization of hospitals’ share of patients. Furthermore, as a marketing technique, we adopted the product portfolio management (PPM) matrix. Based on the concept of the matrix, we drew the “patient” portfolio management matrix. We found that the situation of hospitals in the patient market could be easily estimated using our analysis procedures.

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 The aim of this study is to clarify the actual condition in which the patient has controlled his or her information when he or she presents one's information to the primary nurse, and to find the factors relevant to it.
 We conducted a questionnaire survey of 204 patients in eight hospitals of two different prefectures as a sample. As results, patients were found to have little hesitation as a whole when presenting the information to the nurse, and nearly all patients sought to provide detail information.
 Almost no significant difference was found among patient attributes, i. e. hospital locations, duration of hospitalization and sex.
 In the correlation with a Japanese version of the generalized self-efficacy scale (JHLC), almost no significant correlation was found among all items. However, significant correlation was found among the factors called F (family) of JHLC, items, such as a family’s health condition and a state of excretion.
 The patient’s awareness of the right to control personal information will increase gradually in the near future.
 Therefore, it is important to develop a sensitive and useful scale for measuring the patient’s actual situation controlling personal information.

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