On April 23, 2011, I assumed the office of Director of the International Medical Information Center (IMIC), a foundation in Japan. In my new position, I will endeavor, together with IMIC’s supporting members and its service users, to facilitate the progress of medicine and healthcare as well as the establishment of a healthy society.

IMIC is a public interest corporation that was founded in 1972 with the goals of serving as a core organization in Japan engaged in sophisticated informatics activities on the topics of medicine and healthcare in both Japan and overseas and contributing to progress in medical research and healthcare in a broad sense.

The major activities of IMIC during its early days were searches/supply of domestic/overseas medical literature and translation services. In recent years, the volume of information in the fields of medicine, pharmacology, healthcare, and daily living care, etc., has been rapidly increasing, and the information in these fields is expected to become additionally complex and diversified from now on. Under such circumstances, IMIC is strongly required to supply its supporting members and service users with highly reliable and accurate information pertaining to medicine and healthcare, i.e., EBM (evidence-based medicine) information, in a prompt manner. With this in mind, IMIC will strive to utilize diverse systems arising from information innovations and endeavor to achieve further upgrades in its services related to medical and healthcare information, including information services for the proper use of medicines, database construction support services, EBM support services, and so on. To meet such needs, IMIC counts among its human resources medical information specialists certified as librarians, as well as PhD holders in scientific fields, pharmacists, translators/English native speakers rich in expert knowledge, and others, and it will continue to search, analyze, and process up-to-date information on medicine and healthcare, particularly information pertaining to pharmaceutical products and medical devices, to create high-level expert information and to provide such information extensively to the healthcare industry, academic societies, research groups, research facilities/organizations, and so on.

Through the diverse and sophisticated activities related to medical and healthcare information cited above, IMIC will attempt to grow into the first “medical think-tank” in Japan. I hope that our activities will serve as a source for the latest frontier information required for your activities in medicine and healthcare and that we will be able to play a role in the establishment of healthy societies throughout the world.