Health education provided by a group of professionals from different disciplines, so-called “team medical care”, is considered essential for the treatment of diabetes. When each specialized professional educates diabetic patients on how to manage their condition, patient-centered medical care is realized, and it becomes possible to provide appropriate support to individual patients. The treatment of obesity is somewhat similar to that of diabetes. Diet therapy and exercise are the basic therapies, and diabetes in many obese patients can simply be improved by weight loss. Metabolic syndrome has been reported to be associated with visceral fat-type obesity. In order to prevent the development of atherosclerotic occlusive diseases due to weight loss, individual counseling after each medical checkup is provided by public health nurses or registered dietitians.  Behavior modification is necessary to improve lifestyle. Helpful education and advice by various professionals help patients to modify their behavior, and thus patient-centered medical care can be achieved.  Recently, for the treatment of diabetes, new oral hypoglycemic agents and insulin preparations as well as incretin preparations have become available, indicating that diabetes treatment strategies are increasing. This has allowed better glycemic control in diabetes than was possible before. Nonetheless, diet therapy and exercise remain the basic treatment methods, and they should not be made light of.

Objective : Injectable drugs usually include several products of different dosage and price. It is, therefore, difficult for pharmacists and medical staff to select the optimal combination of the products, which provides product selection and sufficient drug amounts prescribed while minimizing the price. We developed a support program for optimizing by using a processing software, NaU DSP®.
Methods : Our program has a simple function to calculate and find the optimal combinations among the potential alternatives. We applied this program to analyze RANDA®, a cisplatin preparation, which has three products containing 10mg, 25mg and 50mg at a price of ¥4, 555, ¥11, 000 and ¥19, 860, respectively. Seven hundred forty-two prescriptions including RANDA® were investigated.
Results : In seventy-eight prescriptions (11%), there was a reduction in the total price of the product combinations between the selection aided with and without the program.
Conclusion : By using the optimization program, pharmaceutical costs can be curtailed more effectively than by arbitrary selection by medical staff.

Tohoku Medical and Pharmaceutical University, Japan, offers “Early Exposure to Medical Practice” in the first semester for first-year medical students to learn about patient-centered care as well as the real-world conditions and issues faced in community medical practice. Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic during the past two years, we planned and implemented online training, including some disability simulations, which mostly aimed to prevent the spread of infection. The students who completed these training courses reported that the online training had certain advantages over hands-on training ; the two activities implemented were not only effective in preventing infection but also had other benefits that only an online environment could provide. Herein, we report the results and some of the merits of these practices in 2021.