Hospitals and Big Data: Use of Case Mix and E-claim Data in Japan.

The ageing society issue has necessitated the Japanese government conducting health reform. In order to reorganize the health service delivery system, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) has prepared two massive health related data bases; DPC (Diagnosis Procedure Combination) data and NDB (National Receipt Database). The former gathers about 11 million discharged cases from 1,900 acute care hospitals annually. The latter gathers more than 1.7 billion claim data from all medical facilities every year. Using these data bases, we can evaluate the current system and estimate the future health needs of each region. As the backbone of the Japanese health system is a publicly funded private dominant supply system, the existence of useful information concerning health needs is crucial for sound management, especially for the private sector. In this article, the author reveals some examples of the application of these two massive databases for regional health planning and hospital management.