2017 年 55 巻 4 号 p. 143-150
National Database of Health Insurance Claims and Specific Health Checkups of Japan (NDB) is a database in which Japanese claims data, specific health checkups data are stored. It has been managed since 2009 by Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, and was applied to the secondary data use widely from 2011. Claims data which NDB contains cover almost whole insured citizens in Japan, so it is valuable. However, users have to take lots of efforts to integrate many claims data into one patient unit, since 2 types of hashed IDs in the data are both not absolutely reliable. And, although sometimes users had better apply validation studies prior to the research, there is no standardized method of the study protocol for validation. These conditions are considered intractable obstacles for users. For promoting the effective use of NDB more, the close cooperation among various specialists such as clinicians, epidemiologists, researchers of medical informatics, researcheres of health insurance claims, etc. is most important to dissolve these obstacles.