Use of Clinical Indicators in the Municipal Hospitals in Japan: An Analysis Based on a Nationwide Questionnaire Survey concerning Medical Information Management

We conducted a questionnaire survey of public hospitals across the country of Japan in order to analyze the issues and challenges concerning personal data protection faced by medical institutions managed by local municipalities in Japan. The reason for targeting public hospitals is that they are more closely related to the regional medical care plan. Questionnaires were sent to all municipal hospitals (887 hospitals with 20 or more beds that are members of the Japan Municipal Hospital Association: JMHA). Key parts of the findings were published as research material in another journal in 2018. This paper summarizes and analyzes the unpublished portion of the 2017 questionnaire survey by the authors. The analysis of the results focuses on the characteristics of the municipal hospitals surveyed and the use of clinical indicators compared by the size of hospitals. While many small and medium-sized hospitals use a common form of consent for the use of personal information, and many large hospitals have specific consent forms for each department (26.4%). Concerning primal method for disposing or deleting personal information, the most chosen item among small and medium-sized hospitals was the incineration or dissolution method (62.5%); the percentage of contractors outsourcing was relatively high in large hospitals (39.5%). In addition, we found the differences between large and small/medium hospitals concerning the use of the clinical indicators. The most used indicator is average length of hospitalization and the rate of hospital bed utilization (80.4%).