SCUELJapan healthcare data

Solutions · Market entry

The first thing that breaks when you enter Japan is your customer list

Not regulatory approval, not pricing, not hiring. Those have known processes. What has no process is working out which of Japan's hospitals, clinics and physicians you should actually be talking to — and that question has to be answered before your first representative starts work.

Why the usual approach does not work here

Three things that surprise almost every company entering the market.

The specialty a clinic advertises is not the specialty it practises Japanese medical institutions choose which specialties to display, and the display is not a claim about expertise. Two clinics both advertising internal medicine may have nothing in common in what they actually treat. Filtering on the advertised specialty gives you a list that looks reasonable and performs badly.
Claims data cannot see what you are looking for If your product treats a rare disease with no predecessor, there is no prescribing history to target from. If it is used outside insurance coverage — most of what is growing in dentistry, for instance — it never appears in claims at all. And a clinic that opened last month has no claims history by definition.
The obvious identifier is the wrong one Japan publishes a facility code for every insurance-designated institution. It is free, it is official, and it changes when a facility moves or is sold. Building your master data on it is a decision you will discover was wrong about two years later. More on this →

What we hold

Compiled from Japanese public registers and joined into one structure.

Hospitals and clinics, dental practices, pharmacies, long-term care and disability services, and physicians — each as its own database, all linked to the corporation that operates them and, for hospitals, to the doctors working inside. What Japanese registers publish separately, under different identifiers and on different update cycles, we publish joined.

The detail runs deeper than a contact list. Which capabilities each hospital has formally notified to the authorities. How many outpatients a clinic sees in a day. Which physicians hold which board certifications, what they have published on, which trials they have run. Which care homes have a dental clinic under contract. This is the material you filter on when the advertised specialty tells you nothing.

Start with only what matches your criteria

You do not license the whole database to begin with.

Tell us the criteria — a therapeutic area, a procedure volume, a board certification, a geography — and we extract only the facilities and physicians that meet them. A company preparing to launch in one specialty does not need three hundred thousand physician records. It needs the two thousand that matter, in a format its CRM can load on the first day.

Extract Only the facilities and physicians matching your criteria. Delivered as CSV with an English dictionary for every column.
Add attributes Notified capabilities, procedure and patient volumes, equipment, corporate structure — whichever of these actually changes your targeting.
Put it into a CRM and track sell-through Adopt SCUEL IDs from the start and the data coming back from your distributors shares a key with your own records. Perspective, also in the JMDC Group, works on CRM and SFA implementation in the pharmaceutical sector.
Combine with claims data JMDC Inc., our parent, holds claims and health checkup data. Facility and physician master data on one side, patient reality on the other, from one group.

Why this matters for an entrant specifically

An established competitor in Japan already has a master file, a distributor relationship and twenty years of sales history. You have none of those, and the conventional advice is to buy a full market dataset and work backwards.

The cheaper mistake is to start narrow and be able to widen. What makes that possible is not a discount — it is that you are not required to replace your vendor at each stage.

Who already uses this

The Japanese subsidiaries of most global pharmaceutical companies.

Pfizer Japan, AstraZeneca, Bayer Yakuhin, AbbVie, Alexion, Boehringer Ingelheim Japan, Abbott Japan, Takeda, Otsuka and Eisai are among the pharmaceutical companies using SCUEL data, alongside diagnostics and device makers including Exact Sciences, Sysmex and Konica Minolta, distributors, and trading houses.

Several of them arrived at the same point you are at now, and the reason they are on this list is that the question of who to talk to came up before anything else did.

Tell us what you are trying to decide 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 first — correspondence is in English, reports are written in Japanese.

Send an enquiry

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.