In Japan, patients have universal access to any hospitals, leading to substantial increase in waiting time of outpatients and workloads of medical doctors. To resolve those problems, we developed a novel outpatient guide system using mobile phones (POGS). POGS guides patients via mobile phones without constraint of time and space. They can check-in a hospital from the designated nearby area. After check-in, they receive information about waiting time and the final introduction calls to a consulting room. After the consultation, patients are notified when the cashier machines are ready for their payment. We conducted a pilot trial to examine effectiveness of POGS with 10 participants (56.3±9.2 year-old) at the University of Tokyo Hospital. The results show that 9 participants (90%) were free from stress. Furthermore, the time between the final call and the entry to the consulting room of the test participants tended to be shorter in the POGS group (n=20) than the time in the control group (n=319) (47 ± 20 seconds and 112 ± 310 seconds, respectively, p=0.416, Wilcoxon rank sum test).

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　Recently, a lot of medical documents have been computerized. On the other hand, a large amount of paper-based documents are still archived and they are not still reused effectively. Previously we discussed document image recognition methods for medical/clinical documents and their applications. We also discussed the recognition method for schema images in the document. However, annotations written in the schema made the feature vector change drastically, as a result the recognition accuracy was reduced. In this paper, we proposed a schema recognition method considering annotations. 30 kinds of actual schema images used in hospital were employed as experimental materials. After evaluation experiments, the recognition accuracy was improved to 95.27%.

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　The pharmacist who is the specialist of the medicine should participate mainly in the drug therapy, and promote the team medical treatment from the viewpoint of the improvement of the quality of medical care and securing a safe medical treatment. Facility criterion of inpatient pharmaceutical service's reward is as follows. It is necessary to arrange the pharmacist of working full-time of each ward. It is necessary to work more than 20 hours per 1 week per 1 ward. Therefore, the efficiency improvement of the inpatient pharmaceutical service is needed. The application of Microsoft Access 2007 that extracted information necessary for the inpatient pharmaceutical service from the data base of the prescription, the injection order, and laboratory results etc. was made. This system was good at the efficiency improvement of the inpatient pharmaceutical service. This system was able to offer the drug information to medical staff etc., to promote proper use, and the medical malpractice prevention of the medicine. Because the patient for whom attention is especially necessary can be extracted with this system, and the pharmacist take part by priority.

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　To improve pharmacovigilance or drug safety measures, it is important to facilitate international exchange of medicinal product information which is reported to each regulatory authority. However, in the current individual case safety report systems, the items and names used in describing medicinal products are different among the countries/jurisdictions, and, thus, this makes it difficult to promote the smooth and prompt international information exchange on medicinal products. To solve this issue, the International Conference on Harmonisation of Technical Requirements for Registration of Pharmaceuticals for Human Use (ICH) had initiated a topic referred to as “Data Elements and Standards for Drug Dictionaries” which was aimed to support the identification of medicinal products in all ICH regions, and considered the requirements for five medicinal dictionaries. Based on these requirements presented by ICH, in November 2012, the five international standards of electronic transmission model system for medicinal product information have been established by a project of International Organization for Standardization (ISO), referred to as “ISO-IDMP”. This tutorial paper overviews the international standards of ISO-IDMP, including the backgrounds and the current international activities for implementation, and discusses the particular issues that should be considered in Japan.

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