Annual Report 2021

Department of Medical Informatics

Naoki Mihara, Masami Mukai, Katsuya Tanaka, Noriaki Nakajima, Kazuyuki Kitamura, Yukie Okada, Kiyomi Watanabe, Koji Okuda, Miwako Maejima

Introduction

 The Department of Medical Informatics was established on February 1st, 2018 for the management of the hospital information system and network of the National Cancer Center Hospital (NCCH).

The Team and What We Do

 The roles of the Department of Medical Informatics are management of the hospital information systems and infrastructure of the National Cancer Center Hospital and contributing to medicine and cancer research by providing a secure, efficient and advanced environment for information systems.

Research activities

 Through the following projects, we made proposals for information systems that promote the utilization of clinical data and the establishment of a data utilization infrastructure in the hospital.

• A database system for in-hospital clinical information data scrutiny was established for the purpose of establishing a quality assurance mechanism for medical information data in the hospital information system. ("Efforts to Create Real World Evidence", FY2019 AMED Medical Technology Implementation Promotion Project)
• A data collection infrastructure to promote oncology research was developed in the central hospital as a vendor neutral archive (VNA) for clinical research. (CREST / PRISM)
• A prototype Universal Viewer, which enables us to display clinical information in an adequate format according to disease scenarios and situation, was developed.
• Work was done to extract information on the efficacy and safety of cancer drug therapy from unstructured clinical data using our hospital's anonymized database. We showed the distribution and clarified its characteristics.

Education

 We are working to develop human resources who can operate and manage the entire information system so that we can appropriately provide information necessary for medical care and research activities. We are also engaged in information literacy education for the entire NCC through orientation for new employees and support activities for research projects.

Future Prospects

 Through the renewal of the hospital information systems in May 2021, we have developed an Enterprise Database system (Fig.1) that can provide clinical data necessary for medical care and research in a timely and appropriate manner. We will continue to develop advanced hospital information systems to lead medical care and research in Japan and overseas.

Figure 1. The Enterprise Database System of NCCH