Mari Nakamura: Connecting Healthcare

2025/06/23

When examining patients with hypertension, I conduct interviews to record symptoms and progress. When I ask patients, "Around when did your blood pressure start to get high?" they often reply, "Since I was young." Upon further inquiry, they might say, "Maybe around my university days?" or "Perhaps a few years after I started working?"—indicating a time "younger" than the present. However, the range of "when I was young" varies greatly from person to person, making it difficult to determine exactly when the illness began. By the time they visit as patients, treatment is often necessary, and the interview often summarizes the onset with the phrase "since I was young."

At the Health Center, through health management duties for pupils, students, faculty, and staff within Keio, I have come to meet people in age groups where the onset of illness is suspected. In Japan, people across a wide range of ages—pupils, students, and working adults—undergo annual health checkups. For the individuals themselves, these annual checkups are a continuum of annual events; if their blood pressure rises gradually, it is difficult for them to grasp the boundary line themselves, and it must be hard to accurately recognize when the blood pressure began to rise.

With health insurance cards now linked to My Number cards, medical information for the past five visits can be viewed online via the Myna Portal, connecting to Personal Health Records (PHR) such as one's own health checkup data. Currently, the PHRs of pupils and students within Keio are managed individually by each school and university, meaning the PHR becomes fragmented upon graduation. Lifestyle-related diseases such as hypertension rarely develop suddenly; fluctuations in data occur even before the illness begins. Therefore, if the fragmented PHRs within Keio can be connected and managed centrally, the timing of the onset of illness can be identified.

If health checkup data can be viewed chronologically without fragmentation, it will increase an individual's health awareness and provide an opportunity to review lifestyle habits from the time they are "young." The doctors, nurses, and administrative staff at the Health Center are constantly engaged in trial and error, conducting daily epidemiological surveys to contribute to health education, preventive medicine, and evidence for treatment. I hope to connect individual health checkup data with the network within Keio, linking it to the health and medical care of many people.