Japan Working Group Participated in Medical Messe Nagoya

Some of the earliest pilot implementations of the Continua Design Guidelines happened in Japan, beginning around 2009. Now the business environment finally appears to be ready. As one of the countries with the fasted growing aging population, Japan’s health and care framework is in dire need of change. Japan’s major priorities for the coming years include controlling ever-growing healthcare expenditures (currently at 10.9 percent of GDP), making medical and nursing care more efficient, and shifting to preventive care. Remote monitoring, personal health records, and data exchange connectivity are considered important factors, much like elsewhere in the world. 

In early December 2017, PCHAlliance’s Japan Working Group presented at Medical Messe Nagoya, a mid-size medical device and material exhibition at Nagoya, Aichi prefecture. Nagoya is the third largest city in Japan and the home of Toyota Motor Company and many medical technology companies.  Established in 2015, "Medical Messe" aims to promote the medical device industry in Nagoya and seeks to become a showcase for the medical device industry, medical institutions, research organizations such as universities, medical equipment manufacturers, and manufacturing companies aiming to enter the medical field.

The PCHAlliance JWG hosted a dedicated booth to welcome visitors and explain the concept of connected health, technology advancement and the initiatives of PCHAlliance, and it delivered a presentation sharing the world wide adaptation and progress in Japan. Attendees showed considerable interest in national ID usage for healthcare and personal health application ideas for end users. Of special interest was the emergency response project D-CAP following the 2011 Japan tsunami, a joint blood pressure telemonitoring project set up by Continua members that displayed dramatically the benefits of standards in terms of setup speed and flexibility (see http://www.pchalliance.org/news/continua-telehealth-platform-saved-lives-after-japan-earthquake). It was encouraging to see the collaborative relationship among PCHAlliance members including CORE, GE Japan, Renesas, and others. Many interested visitors were educated on connected health in the PCHAlliance booth, and further business discussions were conducted in the CORE booth. Many thanks to CORE for inviting and supporting these activities.  

Stories from other regions in the PCHAlliance global network are very important, and help to show to Japanese stakeholders that the Continua technical framework is sound and can be applied everywhere; the different speeds in personal health deployments are due to other factors, including the social and political infrastructure, insurance and reimbursement, the government relationship with citizens, national ID systems, the maturity of information and communication technologies, and the business framework. The PCHAlliance Japan Working Group is acting as the information hub for stakeholders to accelerate connected health advancement in Japan.