Medical Image Sharing in Japan

This paper reports the history, background including politics, current status of Japan’s health imaging study and other information sharing. Its realization was slow until the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) started paying digital image storage at the same rate as films in 2008. Information sharing was initiated in early 2010s, which was before vendors became ready for Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) cross-enterprise document sharing (XDS), with the result that most of 34 large regional sharing systems are in non-standardized protocol. One standardized example is the Hamamatsu area where inexpensive online PDI (portable data for imaging) was introduced.