Telehealth Emerging in Japan’s Clinical Research and Care

How are clinical research and clinical care industries in Japan responding to the new challenges emerging in the post-pandemic world? “During 2020, it became a very difficult time to initiate a clinical trial, a difficult time to recruit patients to clinical trials which were ongoing, especially if those were clinical trials in patients who were elderly or in cancer therapies. Patients were a little bit reluctant to go to hospitals, even though we had very few cases in Japan,” explains E. Stewart Geary, global safety officer and senior vice president, Eisai Company Limited. “The healthcare system in Japan has one big challenge in that a lot of people are concentrated in large cities, and that's also where healthcare professionals are concentrated. But you have a large elderly population which is still in the countryside in towns which are kind of dying off, are very small, and are probably underserved by healthcare professionals. Because of that, there had been ongoing debate about telehealth.”