The Tokyo Dental College Ichikawa General Hospital will begin charging for in-patient and out-patient treatment through an online dental receipts computation system as of May, 2011. In order to consider how to utilize the computerized receipts system, several factors were considered, including how to overcome problems posed by the joint use of an electronic dental chart system that makes use of a standard dental master and a medical accounting system, as well as how computerized dental receipt data might be useful or influential in the medical and dental professions in the future, where digital medical receipt information is already rumored to be the next up-and-coming tool. This report introduces various problems and solutions that accompany the use of a digital dental receipt system in a hospital associated with a dental college, and aims to discuss the future of digital dental receipt information usage.

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 The purpose of this study was to elucidate the relationship between the time spent by physicians performing clerical work and that spent by physicians operating electronic medical records (EMR). A questionnaire survey was conducted. The participants of this survey were physicians of 6 of 14 corporate hospitals that applied the support program to engage medical office assistants from Tokushima prefecture. Of 127 physicians, 63 responded. In 3 of 6 hospitals maintaining EMR, physicians spent 198.7 min/day doing clerical work including 53.1 min operating EMR. In the other 3 hospitals not maintaining EMR, physicians spent 140.1 min/day performing clerical work including 16.3 min of writing medical charts and slips. This study showed a weak correlation between the time spent by physicians performing only clerical work and that spent by physicians operating EMR (r=0.42). Time spent operating EMR consisted mainly of that spent on medical records for outpatients (27.6 min). The operating time showed no significant differences with respect to physicians' positions. No significant differences were observed in this time with respect to internal medicine and surgery. In conclusion, this study shows that operating EMR is a major part of physicians' workload. Hence, clerical work should be allocated to medical office assistants.

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 The purpose of this study was to analyze quantitatively the learning behavior in the group in medical informatics practice, and to clarify students behavioral pattern. Data analysis was learning attitude survey questions that consists of nineteen items. The analysis performed homogeneity analysis, and the two-dimensional representation of the eigenvectors of members of each group were measured as a closed polygon on the coordinate space. Distribution of responses of a group can be understood by the polygon area. The result showed quantitative changes in thinking during exercise by displaying the distribution of polygons in the group answers. The area of the polygon will be a unified and conscious decision, but the selectivity between individuals can also be understood to challenge for a unified decision-making process even larger area. Students will acquire knowledge through some exercises, this analysis revealed that one end of a unified thought process in the group during their knowledge acquisition. Motivation to continue exercise in the process can be discussed quantitatively decisive action against the self-determination, it became possible to perform a proper teaching to students from the present results.

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 This paper introduces a support system for inputting electronic medical records based on the automatic voice recognition. The system is being constructed by the combination of an electronic medical record that has the ontology-based structure, and a voice recognition engine, and is expected to work in the actual environment. In our previous study, we found that environmental noises caused the failure of the voice recognition, and resulted in the low recognition rate to some subjects. In this study, a recognition experiment was conducted to examine the influence of an acoustic noise in a real situation. Environmental noises were recorded in a medical clinic, which were used in the voice recognition experiment. We found that the noise greater than 20 [dB] in the S/N ratio caused the failure of the voice recognition. In the future work, by employing a noise reduction technique in the voice input part, we further examine the recognition ability.

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 In Japan, “Robot Assisted Therapies” and “Dementia Check Tests” have been conducted to curb growing dementia person and prevent dementia. However, some elderly persons are often very nervous about the tests, as a result, appropriate evaluation cannot be realized. Thus these tests have to be conducted without their awareness of the tests.
 This paper proposed a new method to evaluate dementia severity without their awareness of the tests. In the proposed method, we made a new dementia severity rating scale based on HDS–R, and evaluation experiments in the welfare facility were conducted. In the experiments, we implemented HDS–R into the communication robot called “ifbot”. Ten examinees were employed and their dementia severity were evaluated by (1) the proposed dementia scale and (2) HDS–R. The examinees were divided into two groups based on dementia severity rating, and Mann-Whitney test was conducted. The obtained result showed that the proposed dementia scale could express dementia severity rate appropriately. After advanced discussions, it was clarified the proposed method had problems in voice input, recognition and answer judgment process.

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