Solutions · Home and long-term care
A growing share of medicine and medical devices in Japan is used somewhere other than a hospital ward or a clinic waiting room — at home, or in a care home. The activity is reported to the authorities. It is not published. We obtain it through formal disclosure requests, and have seven years of it.
Capability, activity, and the specific treatments involved.
Whether an institution has formally notified that it operates as a home care support clinic or hospital, and at which of the three grades. The requirements behind those grades tell you a great deal: round-the-clock contact, round-the-clock home visits, a nursing arrangement, an admission route in an emergency, and a minimum number of urgent visits and end-of-life cases per year.
Source: notifications to the regional bureaus of health.
Total patients under care over the year. Visit volumes, separated into planned home visits and on-request visits, and nursing visits. How many full-time physicians the institution assigns to home care. How many other institutions it works with.
And deaths, broken down by where they occurred — at home, elsewhere outside an institution, in the institution itself, or at a partner institution. For a company whose product is used at the end of life, this is the only place that distinction is recorded.
Source: an annual report every home care support clinic and hospital must file. Not published; obtained by disclosure request.
Home self-injection. Central venous nutrition. Peritoneal dialysis. Home oxygen therapy. Home mechanical ventilation. Enteral feeding. Pain management. Pressure ulcer care. Stoma care. Home cancer care. Each recorded as a separate capability.
Source: the national medical information network.
English tends to render both as "home visit", but Japanese practice and Japanese reporting treat them as different things. A planned home visit is scheduled and recurring. An on-request visit is made when the patient calls.
The report in layer 2 counts them separately, and a practice with high numbers of one and low numbers of the other is a different kind of practice. Any analysis that merges them has thrown away the distinction the data was built around.
A disclosure request returns filed paperwork, not a clean dataset.
Each figure in layer 2 carries an accuracy flag recording how far the reported numbers diverge from what the rest of the form implies, graded from consistent through to a discrepancy of more than half. The number of report sheets is retained too, because an institution occasionally files more than one.
None of this is decoration. It means you can decide for yourself which records to trust for a given analysis, rather than taking a cleaned file on faith.
Three groups, with different reasons.
The layer most often missed entirely.
Long-term care and disability services in Japan run on a separate system from medical insurance, with its own reporting. What we hold on that side includes which medical institution each care provider has under a cooperation agreement, which dental clinic, the name and employer of the visiting physician, and the add-on payments the provider has notified — pressure ulcer management, end-of-life care, dementia-related care among them.
For anything used by residents rather than prescribed to outpatients, this is the distribution map. The product is used in the care home; the decision often sits with the medical or dental practice attached to it; and the two are only connected in a dataset that holds both on the same identifiers.
Long-term care providers change faster than medical institutions.
Measuring a full year of our own records, a substantial share of long-term care providers changed at least one of name, address, telephone or fax — and among disability service providers the share was close to a third. A list bought once and left alone decays visibly within a year, in a way that a hospital list does not.
This is the practical argument for a maintained source rather than a one-time purchase, and it applies to this sector more than any other we cover.
Tell us the setting and the product category, and we will come back with what we hold, what it costs, and what it will not tell you. Working with us from outside Japan? Read how engagements run — correspondence is in English, reports are written in Japanese.
Engagements typically start from several million Japanese yen — indicatively, tens of thousands of US dollars. The US dollar figure is for scale only and is not a quoted price. Scope, coverage and contract term determine the final figure.
