As part of the “u-Japan Policy” (*) promoted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, this hospital submitted the case study “Bedside Safety Management System with Electronic Tags” (Medical Information Department, Professor Katsuyuki Kondo) to the case study recruitment “u-Japan Best Practice 2007,” which is a case study of an ICT service or system that solves an issue faced in a variety of lifestyle and business scenarios, and was awarded the Grand Prize in 2007. On June 1 (Thursday) at the Teikoku Hotel, the Internal Affairs and Communications Minister bestowed the award during the ceremony commemorating Radio Wave Day and Info-Communications Promotion Month.

　*u-Japan Policy is a 2010 policy aimed at achieving a ubiquitous network society as the world’s most advanced ICT nation.

This hospital played a pivotal role in the development of the “Bedside Safety Management System with Electronic Tags,” and was the first in the country to put it to practical use in November 2004 (comprehensive implementation). This system reads the patient’s wristband, the hospital staff’s ID card, and injected drugs/transfused pharmaceuticals and other information on an electronic tag with a PDA. If the combination of patient and pharmaceuticals is correct, a record of the process being carried out is recorded on an electronic charting system (who did/gave what to whom and when), and if the combination is incorrect a warning is displayed to prevent errors in administering medication. (For more details please refer to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications u-Japan Best Practices collection.)

With the implementation of this system, pharmaceutical related incidents (cases where there is a possibility events will lead to an accident) have demonstrably decreased, and it expected to further develop as a new technology to both improve the medical safety and increase operational efficiency.

The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications u-Japan Policy homepage can be found here.