CEO
Mie Ishizuka
Representative Director
Medical care should reach the people who need it. My role is to build the ways it gets there, together with people working in care and with companies.
After completing graduate studies at the Graduate School of Law, Kyushu University, I taught law at the University of the Ryukyus. Explaining the law to students, I came to feel that while the law has the power to protect people in weak positions, it is too far away to support them directly.
I wanted to support people more closely, so I became a medical social worker at a hospital. Working with patients, I realized there was a part of their lives the hospital could not see. Going into a patient's home, getting to know the family, and caring for the whole person and their life: the idea of home-based medical care resonated deeply with me. Seeing someone close to me struggle without knowing that home-based care existed also pushed me down this path.
For about ten years, I helped run a home-visit clinic as its administrator. While keeping the quality of care, I put better ways of working in place, and within six months staff who had been struggling with overtime no longer had any. It did not happen in one leap. Small fixes within one department were not enough, so we moved work across departments. Helping staff reach agreement when they feel stuck is, I believe, part of an administrator's job too.
Medical care only means something once it reaches people. I work on that last step.
Graduate School of Law, Kyushu University (completed)
Healthcare Management Program (introductory course), Juntendo University Graduate School (completed, 2018)
Board Member, Japan Home Medical Care Administration Liaison Council (一般社団法人日本在宅医療事務連絡会)
Areas of expertise: designing how decisions flow through an organization (organizational process facilitation), fee schedule revisions, medical advertising and website management, HR and labor management, physician recruitment and retention, training administrators and managers