Japan Association for Medical Informatics

[2-C-4] Standardized Discharge Summary and Patient Referral Document... What’s next for the core information-sharing?

*Sunao Watanabe1 (1. Medical Information System Development Center (MEDIS-DC))

Mimistry of Health, Labor, and Welfare (MHLW) determined the HL7 FHIR as the standardized structure of Discharge Summary and Patient Referral Document in Apr 2022. It is a paradigm shift of medical information-sharing, from an effort of developing the regional medical information network (EHR) to provision of core information forms in a common, standardized platform, which can be utilized at any healthcare facilities. And as the core contents, MHLW proposed six preferential items, i.e., disease names (diagnoses), allergy, essential lab results, prescription, intolerance to specific medication, and infection status. Extracting these contents from the standardized forms is thought to be easy, and they can be stored in a secure national data server, enabling to be shared at any healthcare institution if each patient’s consent is acquired. Now the basic infrastructure has been established. So, in the next step, an effort for appropriate and sufficient registry of data blocks in each standardized form is essential for the authentic and concise information-sharing. Proper postgraduate education of residents/young physicians/medical personnels for description of Summary and Referral Document, along with useful support of application programs in the EMR system seems to be an imminent need. And furthermore, what should be the next? Are these six core contents sufficient for the comprehensive healthcare? In this symposium, the vector for ideal healthcare information-sharing in coming decade will also be discussed.