Solutions · Facility identity
It is official, it is free, and every company entering the market reaches for it first. It also changes when a hospital moves, changes when a clinic is sold, gets reused for a different facility, and issues two separate codes to one building that houses both a medical and a dental practice.
The medical institution code is issued by Japan's regional bureaus of health. SCUEL ID is ours, and has been in operation for over ten years.
| When this happens | Medical institution code | SCUEL ID |
|---|---|---|
| A facility relocates or reorganises | The code changes | Unchanged |
| The operator changes — an acquisition, a succession | The code changes | Unchanged |
| A facility closes and a different one opens | The code may be reused | Never reused |
| One building houses a medical and a dental practice | Two separate codes | One ID |
| You need to exchange records with another company | Not workable — each side is anchored differently | In use between pharmaceutical companies, distributors and IT vendors |
None of this produces an error. Records do not fail to load; they quietly split in two, or quietly merge with a facility that is not the same one. Your row count still looks right.
What surfaces eventually is that your sales history for a hospital stops at the date it moved, or that two territories are both claiming the same clinic. By then the damage is spread across several years of data and there is no clean way to unpick it — the information needed to separate the records was never recorded.
Three things that no amount of general data engineering will anticipate.
The decision costs nothing extra at the beginning and cannot be made later.
A permanent identifier means your sales history survives a hospital moving or being acquired. It means a facility that closed and reopened under new ownership does not inherit the previous operator's record. It means the medical and dental sides of one building are one customer.
It also means the data coming back from your distributors can be joined to your own records without a matching exercise, because SCUEL IDs already circulate between pharmaceutical companies, distributors and IT vendors in Japan. For a company entering the market, adopting the identifier your future counterparties already use is a decision available now and expensive to retrofit.
If you already hold Japanese facility records, we can attach SCUEL IDs to them rather than replacing what you have.
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. If you are at the start of a Japan entry, the market entry page covers what comes before this. Working with us from outside Japan? Read how engagements run.
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.
