Abstract: A medical support system intended to centrally manage medical information generated by more than one hospital and permit medical information interchange among hospitals with easy operations. The system includes a plurality of storage units for storing medical information about patients, an entry unit for entering identification information for identifying a specific patient, an identifying unit for identifying storage units that store medical information about the specific patient on the basis of the identification information from the entry unit, and an access unit for accessing the storage units identified by the identifying unit by storage units identification information to read the medical information about the specific patient.

Abstract: In a medical data managing system, a plurality of medical data are first classified based on a classification item such as sorts of medical examinations. Thereafter, the classified medical data are stored in the same optical disk, or the same clustered data recording region of the optical disk in order to effectively search/retrieve desirable medical data from a plurality of optical disks based upon the classification item covering this desirable medical data.