Aging society has been progressed in Japan, so that it is projected that one in four is an elderly person and that demands of medical and nursing care show a marked increase in the near future. The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare (MHLW) targets to create the Integrated Community Care System (ICCS) in each community to realize every person can live a life with dignity even in the progressive aging society by 2025 when the demands of medical and nursing care will be jumped up caused by the baby boom generation will reach their age of 75. In the ICCS, the function and role of pharmacies/pharmacists are expected to be different from the current ones. Therefore, pharmacies/pharmacists have to find their appropriate function and role in the ICCS, and also have to adapt themselves smoothly to the progressive aging society even though no one in the world has an experience.The MHLW introduced Pharmacy Vision for Patients on October of 2015, and also has established the new pharmacy reimbursement program “Your Pharmacist Reimbursed Program” on April of 2016 as the first step to cope with the progressive aging society at 2025. In this manuscript, I will introduce the new MHLW policies for Pharmacies/pharmacists. And also I will consider the needs for pharmacies/pharmacists and the function and role that they have to fulfill in the ICCS.

In the United States, the concepts of “Pay For Performance” and “Value-Based Health Care” were introduced, and it has been taken up as the way forward for the American health care systems. As one of the measures, an Accountable Care Organization (ACO) was included in the federal Affordable Care Act, and are being promoted for the purpose of balancing cost savings and good quality assurance in the healthcare field. In this manuscript, we provide an overview of the system of ACO, which is one of the value-based health care systems and was introduced with the aim of balancing cost savings and good quality assurance of medical care, and also focus on the role of pharmacists in ACO and summarize their roles they are executing and expected. Furthermore, we discuss on what we should learn from the United States in considering the ideal medical care systems in Japan.