The Healthcare Information and communication standards organization (HELICS Council) was established in 2001 and is engaged in standardization activities. The activities of the HELICS Council are to discuss the standardization policy and contents of the methods, codes and storage formats for electronic exchange of patient information and other information handled by medical information systems, in order to achieve consistent activities among standardization organizations, and at the same time to recommend standards to be used in each field of use, establish "guidelines" and provide the "Medical Information Standardization Report". The Health and Medical Information Standardization Council of the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare (MHLW) examines the standards set by the HELICS Council and establishes MHLW standards. To date, there are 22 MHLW standards.

This tutorial will provide an overview of the activities of HELICS Council, followed by a discussion of recently revised and newly adopted standards from the HELICS guidelines and MHLW standards, including (1) technical specifications for information collaboration infrastructure in regional medical care coordination (XDS: cross-enterprise document sharing and XCA: cross-community access), (2) Radiation exposure management (REM), (3) Dental codes (standard dental code specifications/standard oral examination information code specifications) and (4) medical waveform format (MFER: medical waveform format encoding rules).