We previously heard of the Fujitsu HumanBridge in a conceptual form, but since it made noise in 2011, the system has been deployed in about 200 medical facilities to share medical records and documents of patients. Pitched as a medical network, HumanBridge is a cloud infrastructure that allows all participating medical centers to freely share access to patients medical records (with their explicit consent).
This is typically used to speed up the information access when a patient goes from one facility to another, possibly to consult with a different expert, or because the patient has moved to a new location. Fujitsu also points out that this cloud-based system provides much better resilience to disasters than individual data-system located each medical facilities, because HumanBridge is managed with the latest IT protocols that smaller organization often can’t apply or afford.
Even if the system has been proven to work, the success of such a project depends very much on the political will to implement it. Since Japan’s healthcare system is largely government driven, there are fewer organizations to convince. However, the country is still split into regions and prefectures, and each of them needs to be brought on board separately. Until the project reaches some kind of critical mass, this is going to be the hardest part. I can only imagine what it would take to deploy something like this in places where each hospital and insurance companies need to get on-board.
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