Presentation by Noriyuki Inoue, General Manager, Technology Strategy Department, KDDI (Japan) at the mhealth Israel conference, October 7, 2013: Healthcare and Lifestyle Support with Telco Services
We KDDI is one of 3 major Telecom Operators in Japan. We are operating cellular, fix-line services and Datacenters. This au is our brand name. We have group companies which runs broadband wireless services with WiMAX, regional FTTH or CATV services. And also we have a bank just for mobile banking.
75% of our revenue comes from cellular phone services. It reaches $37B last year.
Our market share of cellurar servide is 28.6 % and we have 37M customers. And share of FTTH is 11.1% which is 2.6M customers
Ok let me talk about Japanese health care system a little bit. We have universal public health insurance system in Japan.
The public insurance system covers everyone living in Japan,
provides necessary medical services including pharmacy, dental treatments, and home visit nursing care at low expense for insured.
And it also provides us “Free Access” to any medical institutions. If we need medical treatment, we can get it from any hospitals or clinics we like, at the same expense.
We, insured persons pay at hospital about 10% to 30% of the total cost of our medical treatment. The rest of the cost is paid by the insurance.
The costs and treatments covered by the insurance are regulated by the government, which means relatively generic treatments can be covered by the insurance, but very advanced medical treatments or treatments in wellness fields are not covered by the insurance.
As for the insurers there are two types of insurance, which is Employee’s Health Insurance and National Health insurance. Many companies has their own health insurance organization as Employee’s Health Insurance and some professions have their own as a part of it.
On the other hand, National Health Insurance is for self employed or residents who don’t have occupation.
When we think of the ICT opportunities in health care industry in Japan, we assume the business model would be like this chart.
In the medical care field, ICT application customer would mainly be the hospitals or clinics or other medical institutions. It’s like B2B model.
In the health examination field, the Customer of our ICT application could be medical institutions who perform health examinations. But the end user would be companies. Because in Japan companies have to make their employee take health examination. So the business model would be like B2B2C model.
As for self care for health field, the customer is the end user of the ICT applications.
KDDI is now focusing on the medical care field and self care field.
I’ll talk them next.
We are providing so called Medical ICT solutions for medical care field. They support hospitals and doctors to improve their efficiencies with clouds, remote access functions, community collaboration facilities. I’m gonna pick up some examples.
As a telecommunications operator, we have deep knowledge and experience in WiFi access and its security. We are providing secure wifi access solution for hospitals. We are building WiFi infrastructures inside hospitals. Not only the infrastructures of Wifi, we are providing but tablets, web conference, and groupware software. With firm secured manner, the Wifi access can also be used for inpatient’s internet access. It’s improving inpatient satisfaction in those hospitals.
As you may know, there are many natural disasters in Japan. There are strong demands for Disaster Recovery. With our image cloud storage, hospitals can store their medical image resources securely and easily. We have site redundant option for disaster recovery, which automatically back up the data to the remote site. This service also contributes to the cost reduction for hospitals to store old medical images for long time, since they do not need to have the huge storage by themselves. And this service also make it easy to share the images outside the hospitals.
Community Collaboration is also important for Japanese hospitals. Big hospitals usually have close relationship with regional clinics around. Our medical ICT Solutions also helps the collaboration between them with KDDI Cloud Platform. KDDI Cloud Platform enables hospitals to share the images and reports with clinics. If a patient comes to a clinic, it can refer the examination data or images of the patient taken by the hospital he/she came last time if necessary. And through this cloud, the reservation for detail examination in the hospitals can be made from the regional clinics if needed, for example.
Remote Image Viewing System is for emergency situation. It enables a doctor outside his hospital to view medical images like CT image on his/her smart phone or tablet. We put a image sending server in the hospital to compresses the image suitable for cellular networks. And we are providing viewer applications for smart phone and tablet which can zoom images very smoothly.
We are using stream cipher that was developed and standardized by KDDI labs to send images fast and securely.
Those are the examples for our medical ICT solutions.
I’m gonna talk about our services around self care for health field. We have 2 types of health promotion services. One is mainly for self management support service Karada Manager, the other is Sports and Fittness activities support service , au Smart Sports. Those are the services which consist of Smart phone or feature phone applications, and contents on a cloud.
Since we started those services in 2008, 2009, we have provided many related products and events. Feature phone which was specialiezed for fitness or running and armbands, bluetooth earphone, magazine tie up articles and running/walking events. We have been making an ecosystem around our health promotion services.
I’m gonna introduce each services.
Karada Manager “Body Manager” provides wide range of self management support contents. Logging foods you have with nutrition and energy and also logging weight and body fat. With your log result, Health concierge provides personal advice for health promotion and diet or weight control.
Medical Advice is more medical side contents. After you input you result of health examination, you get analysis of your result and advise for health. Healthy recipe recommends daily healty diet menu with recipe. Walk logger logs daily walk log and visualize them. And so on.
Those contents are actually run by ???
au smart sports Run and Walk service is more specialized for Runnig Data logger. The application on the GPS capable phone cariculates accurate distance, time, pace and enegy you consumed and display them realtime with MAP. It can record lap time also. Those data is sent to the cloud and you can see the logged data by graph chart from PC or smart phone. The application has other 2 modes which are WALKING and BIKING. If you choose them, the data will be more accurate when walking or biking.
We have runner’s station as a part of service ecosystem. Our runner’s station provide locker rooms, shower, rental wear and mobile phone services. It is placed just beside the most famous running course in Japan which is around the imperial palace center of Tokyo. Not only it’s the part of ecosystem but it helps ads of our services to core customers
As for au smart sports fitness, we provide fitness exercise programs that can be done alone. It is the application on smartphone or feature phone.
Fitness My trainer gives you a personalized advise and an exercise program plan according to your life style or your sports experiences. Another content, Fitness everywhere proposes fitness exercise you can do now according to where you are. After you choose where you are, for example, in an office or your living room, or even in a train, the application presents an exercise you can do there.
And you can search exercises by categories like yoga, stretch, piratis, or by a parts of body you would like to shape up. The exercise is shown by 3D pictures so you can easily copy the move of the exercises.
With those features, total number of membership of the Karada Manager and au Smart Sports have been growing and it have reached 3 million 2 years ago.
Those are our activities as Telecom Operator now.
This is the Japanese populations and their distributions of ages. As you see here, Japanese population will be rapidly shrinking from 2015. and Japan is getting older and older. This red line shows the percentage of over it will be reaching 30 % in the year of next Tokyo Olympic game 2020 ! Japan is the fastest aging country in the world but the tendency is the same among many developed countries.
So, our challenge is to have the good solution for Nusing and Daycare fields with mobile networks or devices. We are now doing some field experiments with daycare center and home nursing institutes.
There are many problems that can be solved in this field with ICT. If you seek opportunities in Japan, please take a look at the field.
That my conclusion on this presentations.