Anti-Depression Project

Depression as a social challenge
Depression is one of the major causes for suicide. Some report says 4 million people including latent patients are suffering from this condition, of which 60% is at employment. And because its recurrence rate rises as it repeats, the measures to help those on leave to return to work, called “ Depression Rework” is critical.

Chance to promote “Depression Rework” through IT collaboration
In “Depression Rework,” the challenge is that a large number of the people who come back to work from the leave often face depression again. It was believed that the situation was such that the doctors in charge of the treatment may be making decisions about returning to work without being able to understand what it is going to be like for the patients to go back to work because the stakeholders, medical professionals, counselors, and Rework Facilities, were not sharing enough information. With IT and by building seamless cooperation among such multiple stakeholders, there was a possibility that this challenge could be solved.

Proposed to a telecommunications carrier about business idea “Depression Rework,” which was designed to provide countermeasures against depression
Japanese major telecom company “A” was aiming to realize “Connected Medicine” via IT. They own electronic medical records, which is readable for a long period of time meeting the need for depression treatment. They also run hospitals with advancing IT and they were already connected with over 100 clinics.

e-solutions proposed to the company the business idea that could potentially solve the challenges in “Depression Rework”. Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) had a plan then to “Develop cross-regional system where medical professionals are able to share and utilize single information among medical, elderly care, health institutions” and we assisted the company in their application in the medical information sharing promotion business.

Applied for PoC Project as Consortium
We compiled business flow to test multiple conditions with simulated patients and built PoC Project plan. Also formed a consortium involving universities, academic societies, hospitals so to ensure to include expertise in the area of depression and “rework” which was necessary for this PoC project.

Also at that time METI was planning to form a relevant committee and we thought it was critical to be a part of this committee to win this PoC project. We contacted directly to the responsible person in charge within METI, which led to the successful adoption of “ PoC Project to help people with depression to return to work by utilizing IT”.