Mid-NET: Medical information database network project to utilize electronic healthcare data for drug safety

MID-NET (Medical Information Database Network) project is a national project initiated by MHLW (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare) and PMDA (Parmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency) to establish the DB network using electronic healthcare data for drug safety. The key features of MID-NET are adopting 1) distributed dedicated database systems among 23 hospitals of 10 hub medical institutions, and 2) SSMIX2- based standardized database systems retrieved from electronic health records in the hospitals for analysis and evaluation of ADR (Adverse Drug Reactions). In MID-NET, each member hospital creates the integrated data source system, submits the received query scripts that are requested from PMDA to the system, and sends the analysis result with/without anonymized individual data to the center for integrated analysis. PMDA accesses, merges, and analyzes the result data using exclusive PC in the center via the virtual private security network. Two major practical problems were occurred during the process of constructing the hospital data source system; the one is derived from the various understanding for EHR venders of SS-MIX2 specification and another is the insufficient work of each hospital for mapping from local coding systems as well as data format to standard ones. After these problems were solved through system verification and data quality control tasks, MIDNET is expected to be put into production from April 2018. © 2017, Japan Soc. of Med. Electronics and Biol. Engineering. All rights reserved.