With aging population and decreasing number of active doctors as well as expanding regional disparities, in order to allow citizens to have equal medical access it is necessary to further develop medical IT. Although it is raised as one of the important growth strategies by the national government, because of the limitation that comes from laws and official notices, the reality of medical IT is still far off than what the people actually need. Therefore, medical IT needs thorough effect verification before the actual lawful implementation so that it will be beneficial for actual regional users.
When looked as a whole, a prefecture of Kagawa is blessed with the number of doctors and medical facilities. However, majority of facilities are clustered in Takamatsu city and the central region of Kagawa, making it difficult for inhabitants on small islands and mountainous regions to receive quality medical services. Moreover, the current tendency of decrease in doctors means less dispatching of doctors to such areas, causing further inequalities of medical service quality between urban area and remote areas. In difficult medical cases, patients from remote areas are required to visit central hospitals, but that is a heavy burden for patients in both physical and economical aspects.
In order to correct such inequality, Kagawa prefecture has been putting effort in establishment of regional medical network, and this effort is now known as the “Kagawa Medical Information Exchange”, or K-MIX. This IT network which was developed through industry-academia-government collaboration now connects more than one hundred participating medical facilities, and it is proven to be useful for patient referral, image diagnosis assistance, regional cooperation critical path for stroke.
It is possible to say that the Kagawa prefecture already has medical IT infrastructure, and more than a decade of operating experience has nurtured human resources and accumulated related knowledge.
Due to such background, a plan to integrate medical IT system and infrastructure was proposed to better suggest a business model using telemedicine and HER/PHR to residents of the prefecture. In addition, it was necessary to build a guideline to better lead the field in actual implementation and operating a new scheme. Thus, our NPO, e-Health Care Innovation In Kagawa, was founded with an aim to establish better society with medical and social welfare services.