Clinical Information Backup:
A Prefectural Back-up System of Clinical Information After Great East Japan Earthquake 2011

On March 11, 2011, the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami hit the northeastern part of Japan, resulting in 15,895 deaths and 2,539 missing persons as of March 1, 2018. Moreover, many medical facilities were destroyed, resulting in the loss of medical information stored in paper records or on servers in hospitals and clinics.

Therefore the need for a backup system for saving all clinical information during disaster preparation was highlighted.

In 2012, a prefectural medical network system, the Miyagi Medical and Welfare Information Network (MMWIN), introduced a cloud backup data storage service for disasters. By the end of July 2019, the total backed up clinical data, including patients’ basic information, disease names, blood tests, and prescription list, reached 450 million items from 12 million persons.

Dr. Masaharu Nakayama, Professor in the Department of Medical Informatics at the Tohoku University School of Medicine will share the challenges in maintaining this project, and how this clinical information backup system for disasters increases interoperability through the facilitation of information sharing among medical facilities.

AI research in healthcare is growing by leaps and bounds in Korea in the commercial and academic sectors. The recent MFDS (Ministry of Food and Drug Safety) approval of AI software as a medical device and progressive funding of AI in the healthcare industry by the Korean government are speeding things up.

A key example is the Dr. Answer project, a pioneering effort to bring about the efficient utilization of medical big data and the development of AI-based precision medicine solutions. The project involves 26 hospitals and 22 ICT/software companies that are developing 21 software across 8 disease categories.

Listen as Dr. Young-Hak Kim, Director of Health Innovation and Bigdata Center Chair at Asan Medical Center shares on how the Dr. Answer consortium will play a key role in building an AI-driven healthcare platform in Korea by developing several core technologies for medical big data utilization and providing safer and more accurate personalized care options for medical staff and patients throughout the healthcare delivery system.