Foreword

The system of Medical information has seen progress. It began with the streamlining of medical accounting, promoting order entries, and then computerizing medical records. All of those innovations have been contributing not only to reducing the wait time but also to improving medical safety, making an end of handwritten requests, preventing patient mix-ups, etc. Now that the contents of medical records are to be also integrated into medical information system, what is going to be required? It is absolutely necessary to support medical care for patients through the promotion of the information sharing of team medicine. The promotion of education and research, early detection of side-effects, and the creation of clinical evidence, as well as guidelines, will be also required.

In order to satisfy those requirements, vast amounts of data of Organized Computing - a hospital information system which contributes to medical management - is essential, End User Computing – a tool that can easily exteriorize users’ effective ideas – is suitable for the application and analysis of the data. When we combine these two factors, we are confronted with the following three issues:

• The Hospital information system has yet to standardize its data output format,
• To realize a secure connection between the former that aims to be isolated from the Internet and the latter that requires the use of the Internet,
• How to generate documentation for the latter in the case where it is incorporated into medical treatment.

With regard to the first issue, as the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare set eight standards in March, 2010, it is expected that each medical information system will be equipped with standard information output function. In terms of the second and the third issues, the previous similar books have gone no further than noting their convenience and flexibility, and this is the first book that has successfully referred to those issues.

I sincerely hope that this book will help the readers contribute to further promoting medical science and medical care in research and educational processes, and that this will also help improve the readers’ medical operating environment such as preparation of documents and reports.