ITOCHU Announces a Capital and Business Alliance with MNES, a Provider of Cloud Services for Medical Institutions

March 9, 2022

ITOCHU Corporation (headquartered in Minato-ku, Tokyo; Keita Ishii, President & COO: hereinafter "ITOCHU") announced today that ITOCHU has entered into a capital and business alliance with MNES Inc. (headquartered in Hiroshima-shi, Hiroshima; Shinichi Abe, President & CEO: hereinafter "MNES"), the provider of LOOKREC, a cloud service that enables medical institutions to manage and share real-time medical images.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for medical institutions to introduce IT and digital technologies have dramatically increased. However, within the 110,000 medical institutions across Japan, more than 90% of them are general practitioner's clinics. They are facing the necessity for safe and efficient digitalization with minimum investment in their system. In such circumstances, more and more attention has been drawn to cloud-based services that can significantly reduce the cost of system installation, repairment and maintenance by utilizing the latest technology. The introduction of these services has been progressing steadily.

MNES is a pioneer in providing unique services to medical institutions with a complete cloud-based format, with a dedicated development system for Google Cloud.* Its flagship product, LOOKREC, is a cloud service that enables physicians and medical professionals to manage and share real-time medical images such as CT, MRI and other medical images taken by professional equipment, with no limit on storage capacity, aiming to achieve remote team medicine that is easily operated and low at cost.
In addition, MNES provides medical institutions with advanced remote imagery diagnostic services provided by the company's specialists. CT, MRI and other medical images taken at medical institutions are carefully examined by specialists, and their interpretation of the images can be immediately accessed via LOOKREC. For medical examination facilities that are required to make accurate diagnoses by using a large amount of images, MNES offers a fast and accurate next-generation medical image interpretation service using AI and a dedicated viewer that enables rapid diagnosis which has been adopted by many institutions.

Through the capital and business alliance with MNES, ITOCHU will support the connection of new technologies and services in the healthcare field to MNES's cloud services by utilizing its domestic and overseas networks. In addition, ITOCHU will support the introduction of cloud services for medical institutions by collaborating with GI Cloud, Inc. (headquartered in Minato-ku, Tokyo; Tasuku Yamazaki, President & CEO), an integrator specialized in Google Cloud, which was established as a wholly owned sub-subsidiary in March in 2021.

ITOCHU transforms business through its "market-in" approach, which is a basic policy included its medium-term management plan, and this effort is in line with this policy. ITOCHU will continue to position the healthcare field as a priority area, and will plan and develop new services that meet the needs of patients, medical professionals and medical institutions and actively develop its business to contribute to a society where better healthcare is provided.

  • *Google Cloud is a trademark of Google LLC.

Illustration of the LOOKREC Service

Remote diagnosis by interpreting images

MNES Inc.

Headquarters Hiroshima-shi, Hiroshima Prefecture
President and CEO Shinichi Abe
Established October 10, 2000
Business description Medical support cloud service, remote image diagnosis service
URL https://mnes.life/ (Japanese)