OBJECTIVES

: Regional medical care support hospitals, being approved by the prefectural governor, refer to a category of medical institutions stipulated in Medical Care Act for the purpose of their being responsible for cooperation between regional hospitals and clinics in Japan. The purpose of this study is to reveal uneven distribution of approved hospitals by region and its factors which have been challenging issues in particular by quantitatively understanding the actual states of regional medical care support hospitals through the linkage of publically available data of medical institutions.

METHODS

: As data reported by each medical institution is published individually by each prefectural government on the Internet, all data was downloaded from corresponding websites by scraping. An application to acquire data was prepared by Visual C#. In addition, a medical institution database was created with the use of SQL Server 2014. We also did geocoding with using ArcGIS in order to add geographical information. Statistical analysis was performed using R 3.4.0 while adopting Tableau 10.3 as BI tool.

RESULTS

: We mapped the density of all medical institution with beds in Japan by medical region. Out of 344 medical regions in Japan, 111 of them didn’t have any regional medical care support hospital. Meanwhile, 21 medical regions had 5+ approved regional medical care support hospitals in their respective regions. A region with fewer clinics surrounding medical institutions tended to have fewer regional medical care support hospitals. No correlation was found among four requirements necessary for the approval, accordingly no synergy effect being observed. We have made the created database open to the public from the perspective of open science.

CONCLUSIONS

: It is necessary to review the requirements for the approval in order to reflect the current regional medical care support functions.