Trends of utilization of information technologies in clinical laboratory and pathology domain

The life expectancy of the Japanese population is one of longest in the world. Society is aging, with fewer children, increasing the total national medical payment in Japan. This situation has forced the Government to reduce the payment and to increase the efficiency of the medical system, so information technologies are expected to contribute to these policies. Electronic patient record systems (EPR) were expected to be used widely, but only 23% of clinical training hospitals have implemented them. This is mainly due to the lack of incentives and large costs to install EPR. Standardization is a good method to reduce system construction cost and increase its quality. New global IHE activities are expected to solve these problems with methodologies of workflow analyses, standard applications, tests and demonstrations. Laboratory information systems (LIS) have a long history and tradition of standard interfaces for connecting computers with analyzers. IHE activities for LIS are providing easy and secure connections with hospital information systems (HIS). Pathology departments also have their own information systems. IHE activities for pathology were launched in 2005, and we are now developing in collaboration with the international IHE pathology working group, HL7 SIG pathology and DICOM WG-26. Pathologists and technical experts in Japanese laboratories are encouraged to join IHE activities to ensure good results.