Message from the President

Since the mid-1980s, Japan has been the country with one of the longest life expectancy at birth in the world, probably due to excellent public health and health care systems. However, Japan also faces significant challenges regarding the financial sustainability of its healthcare system, partially due to a declining birthrate and working-age population and suboptimal economic growth. To maintain the quality of and the access to healthcare services while making the health system financially sustainable in the long run, Japan needs to design and modify its healthcare, long-term care, and public health policies (hereinafter referred to as “health policy”) based on robust empirical evidence.

While the importance of evidence-based medicine in clinical settings has been widely recognized since the 1990s, evidence-based policymaking (EBPM) is still in its early stages, and health policies are often not designed based on evidence. To implement EBPM effectively in health policy, it is important for policymakers to engage in dialogue with researchers, enabling policymakers to understand what is known from empirical evidence, and researchers to better understand priorities of the policymakers. However, such platforms for dialogue remain scarce. Moreover, although health policy is an interdisciplinary field encompassing health economics, political science, statistics, sociology, business, ethics, and other disciplines, there are still few opportunities for experts from these diverse fields to share evidence and exchange ideas.

In this context, we believe that establishing a platform to share evidence and exchange views on health policy is essential to realizing EBPM. To this end, we founded the “Japan Health Policy Research Association (JHPA)” to bring together a wide range of health policy researchers, policymakers, and industry representatives, promote robust health policy research, and advance EBPM with the goal of improving health outcomes while curbing healthcare spending growth through improved efficiency. We believe that JHPA will serve as a platform (hub) for disseminating health policy research findings and facilitating communications among researchers and policymakers, leading to the practice of EBPM grounded in robust evidence.

We look forward to the active participation of all those involved in health policy research and practice, whether in academia, government agencies, industry, or other organizations, who share and support our founding principles.

February 28, 2024

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