I would like to broadly contribute to healthcare through better medical care using IT

Currently, I am promoting the use of IT in hospitals to improve the efficiency of doctors and nurses, and to support medical research. I learned about the university curriculum through my work, and was attracted by the idea of being able to study while working and also by St. Luke’s history and reputation, so I decided to enroll in the course. The main pillars of public health are epidemiology and statistics. As I had worked only in IT and never medicine, I was surprised by many things during my studies but it gave me new ways of thinking and viewpoints.
For example, the numerical values we handle at our university have to be much more precise and reliable than those used for commercial and marketing purposes because of the nature of the values that affect human lives.
I feel that knowing where to find truly reliable information will help me in my future life and work. One of the most significant changes was that I acquired the ability to read academic literature. I had never even heard of PubMed* before enrolling in the course, but now I routinely obtain necessary medical information from PubMed and assess its reliability.
As I am engaged in medical and health support work, having a knowledge base backed by academic papers helps me gain the trust of customers and gives me a great advantage when making proposals.
　Many of my classmates are doctors, nurses, pharmacists and others who work in the health care field. I made a lot of friends with specialized knowledge, which is an invaluable asset that I would not have gained if I hadn't studied at this university. On the other hand, I believe that public health is an area of study that should be studied more widely, even by people like me who are not directly involved in the medical field.
It may feel like a very specialized field, but "human health" is the root of everything and should not be irrelevant to any job or to our lives.
I would like to continue and deepen my current work of linking IT and medicine. I am also going to link diet and agriculture by utilizing my studies from the public health course such as Environmental Epidemiology, Maternal and Child Health, Public Health Nutrition, and Health and Behavioral Science. I also would like to practice and spread the concept of “Food is Medicine”.

March 2020