Japan's medical care is extremely excellent. If you become ill, you can be immediately taken to the hospital and receive treatment from a doctor. Moreover, the treatment can be done at a reasonable cost. Medical care in Japan can provide treatment much faster than in the UK. In the UK, patients sometimes have to wait months for surgery. Even with the excellent medical care in Japan, there are weaknesses. That's incomplete medical data.
One way to look at the medical data problem is through receipt records. The receipt information such as patient information, insurance burden, public expense burden, name of injury or disease, record of start date of medical treatment, insurance score, and medical treatment results. By using receipt data, it is also possible to measure the impact of the proportion of medical expenses paid at the counter. Even if the burden at the counter increases, if the number of people who become ill decreases, the total medical expenses will decrease as a result. On the other hand, if, despite the increased burden, the number of illnesses increases and medical costs increase, it will be easier to identify the cause of the problem. This extremely important receipt contains information that is not included in Japan.
The information not included in the Japanese receipt is the doctor's ID number. I can tell which medical institution is providing the treatment, but I cannot know which doctor is providing the treatment. Because we don't have doctors' ID numbers, we don't have data on how their individual practices are producing results. Currently, it is not possible to obtain data on the number of surgeries performed by individual surgeons and their success rates. In the United States, the receipt includes a physician ID. As a result, an interesting fact emerges from the analysis of receipts. Research in the United States has shown that the treatment and medical costs for patients with the same injury or illness vary depending on the individual doctor. Even for the same cold, treatment and medical costs can vary. Regarding internal medicine hospitalizations, there are cases that the variation in medical costs is greater between doctors within the same hospital than between hospitals. It is known that more than half of the regional disparity in medical costs for cardiologists is due to the influence of environmental factors such as surrounding doctors. The more heart disease specialists there are, the lower the medical costs will be. If the doctor's ID is included in the receipt, it seems possible to know the quality of medical care provided by each doctor. This is valuable information for patients.