My Number card health functionality

Something truly useful for My Number cards

I haven’t been a fan of the My Number system, but since getting my card last year I have been slowly coming around.

Last week I saw a sign in a hospital that may well accelerate the process and turn me into an advocate for My Number.

It seems that starting soon patients will be able to give permission for hospitals and doctors to share medical records across intitutions.

This is huge. I have lost track of the number of duplicate tests I have had to have in Japan because hospitals and clinics don’t talk to each other, and having medication records available digitally will mean I won’t have to worry about carrying my ratty little kusuri techou around with me any more.

Has anyone used this system yet?

13 Responses

  1. And if you have my number you can renew your foreign card via the net without needing to visit immigration at all. I found this out the day after waiting at immigration for 3 hours just to renew the foreign card.

    1. Are you sure? I checked on this recently as my zairyu card is up in June, but my understanding is that you can now do some visa stuff online, but not renew zairyu cards (and the visa stuff process is so annoying that it is just easier to go in and do it in person -we just hired a new teacher and were very disappointed by the user unfriendliness of the online application).

        1. However, ‘renewal of zairyu card’ is not on that list (for permanent residents).

  3. The official site doesn’t tell you that the My Number card is slightly more expensive to use each time though 🙄

    With so much push to get people to use it, making it more expensive for the patient seems like a bit of a footgun, and not putting it in the official FAQ seems quite dishonest.

    https://nordot.app/881092504909692928

    1. That is ridiculous (albeit a tiny amount of money).

      Should the 21 yen cheaper, then everyone would immediately start using it like the supermarket self-checkout machines…

    3. As the diagram on the referenced site shows, the price of a “first consultation” at facilities accepting My Number cards is going up there even for those using regular health cards, by 9 yen through March 2024. Users of My Number cards will pay 21 yen more than now for their first visit, and 12 yen more for subsequent visits, with an additional 9 yen required for filling prescriptions. This may seem small at first, but that’s just the patient’s 30% co-pay. Hospitals end up with 70 yen more for a first visit and 40 yen more for each subsequent visit from My Number card patients (and “first visit” fees reset once a treatment ends). Hospitals get an extra 30 yen for first-time consultations even for regular health-card patients at My Number card facilities.

      The idea is to provide an incentive for medical facilities to gear up to accept My Number cards as health cards, in view of the fact that only about 14% of them do now. Every patient at participating facilities will pay more in some way (through at least March 2024). A perverse way of sharing the pain?

      Hospitals etc. that don’t take part in the system won’t be raising their current fees.

  4. I feel like I am taking crazy pills.

    Seems like the Japanese government often does something like this: one part of the government creates some policy, and another part of the government (Ministry of Finance?) then messes it up to save a little money…

  5. It’s still in the “someday” bin, but if MyNa becomes the health card, or at least gets associated with all of your bills, then the deduction for ¥100,000+ of medical bills might become automated–so that the tax filer doesn’t have to track and submit forms for it, keep receipts, and so on.

    1. You may get you wish sooner than you think. Beginning this year, in fact, though only for data from last September, medical-care payment data is apparently being made available through your MyNa Portal early each February, and the data can be passed on to the NTA online 作成コーナー site, which fills out the appropriate spaces on the return automatically. And in that case, yes, the tax filer no longer needs to track and preserve records.

      Not only that, this automatic return-completion function seems to be already available for furusato nozei, mortgage loans, and a couple of other major items, as long as all parties are plugged into the system.

      I’ll leave it to those with cards to investigate and report in greater detail, but the NTA sites describing how to connect MyNa Portal with tax returns are these (the second is the detailed version):

      https://www.nta.go.jp/taxes/tetsuzuki/mynumberinfo/mynapo.htm
      https://www.nta.go.jp/taxes/tetsuzuki/mynumberinfo/mnp_junbi/kakutei.htm

      For a general overview, either download the NTA’s pamphlet:

      https://www.nta.go.jp/taxes/shiraberu/shinkoku/r3_smart_shinkoku/pdf/03.pdf

      or watch their YouTube video:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2wynAy67JM

      Maybe everything’s not lost, after all.

      1. That’s good news. As someone who has done that record-keeping several times now, having it done–even a little bit automated–would be wonderful.

        Same would apply to someone in a care-taking capacity. It would lighten their load.