SCUELJapan healthcare data

Solutions · Vaccines

From outside Japan this looks like one market. It is 1,747

For vaccines outside the routine programme, whether a person gets vaccinated depends heavily on whether their municipality subsidises it, by how much, and for which age groups. Every municipality decides separately. There is no national list — not in English, and not in Japanese either.

Two categories, and only one of them is predictable

The distinction is set by the Immunization Act and it governs everything downstream.

Routine vaccination

Defined in the Act. Split into two classes: for category A diseases there is a duty of effort on the recipient and public funding is the norm; for category B diseases there is no such duty.

Demand here is comparatively stable and nationally structured.

Voluntary vaccination

Not defined in the Act — it is what remains once routine and temporary vaccination are accounted for. Which means there is no national rule about who pays.

Each municipality decides whether to subsidise, how much, for whom, and how many times. This is where the commercial variation lives.

Why this is invisible from outside

A national vaccination coverage figure tells you the average of 1,747 different policies. It will not tell you that two neighbouring municipalities differ by tens of thousands of yen in what a resident pays out of pocket, which is the difference between a product moving and not moving.

Nor is it published centrally. Each municipality states its own conditions on its own website, in its own format, and changes them by fiscal year.

Three layers we hold

The institution, the municipality, and what is actually happening.

Which institutions administer which vaccines Recorded per medical institution, covering the routine programme, adult and paediatric vaccines, and a separately identified set for travellers — yellow fever, hepatitis A, rabies, typhoid, meningococcal and others. For a travel vaccine company this is the only route to knowing where in Japan a vaccine can be administered. Source: the national medical information network. Institutions report this themselves, so disclosure is uneven and not every institution appears.
What each municipality subsidises Not merely whether a subsidy exists, but the eligible age range and sex, the proportion reimbursed, the ceiling, the resident's maximum out-of-pocket amount, limits on the number of doses and on revaccination, plus the source URL for each. Compiled by searching and manually checking all 1,747 municipal websites.
Which institutions are actually administering Where an institution publishes that it is running a vaccination programme, that can be detected from its website — including, in some cases, which manufacturer's product it holds. Via SCUEL RD.
Who reaches the elderly Care providers record the medical institution they work with under agreement and the visiting physician's name and employer. For vaccines whose primary recipients are older people, these are the practices doing the administering. See also home and long-term care.

What is in the municipal subsidy dataset

Every field was read off a municipal web page by a person.

Prefecture and municipality With standard codes, so it joins to anything else geographic.
Disease, vaccination category and vaccine Including whether it falls under the routine programme or is voluntary.
Whether a subsidy exists With a flag for cases where only a previous year's scheme could be found.
Eligibility Age range, sex, which dose in a course.
The money Proportion reimbursed, subsidy ceiling, and the resident's maximum out-of-pocket amount. Municipalities express these in incompatible ways — "half, up to 3,000 yen", "5,448 yen subsidised, 3,500 yen payable" — and normalising them is the part that had to be done by hand.
Limits Doses per course, restrictions on revaccination, other conditions.
Source and date The URL it was read from and the date it was checked.

Read this before you scope anything

The compiled dataset covers shingles, pneumococcal and influenza vaccination for a single fiscal year. It is not maintained on an update cycle. Collection dates differ by vaccine and by municipality — influenza was gathered during the season, for instance.

Coverage of other vaccines, other years, or a refreshed collection is scoped individually. We would rather say that plainly than imply a currency the data does not have: walking 1,747 municipal websites is weeks of work, so we agree the vaccines and the period with you before starting.

Finding the institutions that do not say so

Only a minority publish their vaccination arrangements.

In a survey of one prefecture we analysed the websites of several thousand medical institutions. A fifth mentioned the vaccine at all; around one in eight could be confirmed as administering it. That is a real list, but a small one relative to the market.

The more useful result came from comparing those institutions against a random sample. The ones administering had recognisable characteristics — particular specialties displayed, particular notified capabilities including infection control and cancer care coordination, more nurses, a younger director, longer opening hours, more outpatients per day. Applying that profile nationally produced a graded set of institutions matching five, four or three of those attributes.

The institutions publishing that they vaccinate are limited in number. But their attributes can be learned, and the ones that have not published can then be found. The same method applies wherever the visible population is small and the attributes are recorded.

Tell us the vaccine and the question, and we will tell you which of these layers answers it — and what it will not tell you. Working with us from outside Japan? Read how engagements run first.

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.