As you know, my boss and co-worker have come to Tokyo recently. I don’t think I’ve actually explained on this blog what job it is that I do. Over the last summer, my friend Mike, who is a student at MIT forwarded me a job offer of a research project in MIT’s Sloan School of Business that was looking for someone with an economics background who could also speak/read/write Japanese, as well.
So, since I’m an economics major, have studied Japanese for a while and was looking for something to do during the summer, I naturally applied and they later accepted me. Last summer, I went and lived with Mike at his fraternity in Boston which was really fun. I ended up working on a couple of projects, but the main one was the one whose boss is here now.
There’s a hospital in a Shinjuku ward that implemented a system which records electronically a whole lot of data. For example, there are records of when an injection is ordered, when the injection is mixed in the pharmacy, when it is transferred to the nurse’s station, when it is injected, etc. There are also records for if this injection order is cancelled or if it is re-ordered, and whether or not it is thrown away or returned to the pharmacy.
Since we had all this data, our project analyzed it and also analyzed work flow using something called System Dynamics to analyze how nurses mixed injections, etc. This is the first time that my boss and co-worker have actually come to Tokyo and seen the hospital. So, they’re doing that and also continuing to work on the project.
My job mainly involved translation of documents from English to Japanese, Japanese to English and some analysis of the data. When I first started working, I had to translate a lot of documents about the data from Japanese to English and I had to do a lot of work translating column headings for the data. After that, I worked on analyzing the data including figuring out a way to calculate the top five most costly drugs for the hospital that were wasted due to cancelled orders.
Recently, which I’ve been working on now, is translation from English to Japanese which is pretty difficult. I translated my boss’s presentation which he gave and I have begun to translate some article which he wrote on the work we’re doing. Going from Japanese to English is easy enough since I can write natural English and don’t have to worry about that. Going from English to Japanese, however, poses that problem of not just only understanding the language but also being able to write it naturally in the target language. I, of course, get my Japanese friend to help correct me after I’ve written it all, lol.
So, some of the results of the project so far have been to suggest a way to mix the top 5 most costly drugs separately from the others. Because these top 5 most costly drugs are most likely to be cancelled resulting in waste, they should be mixed later, thus increasing the chance that they could be saved if they are cancelled since mixed drugs have to be thrown out but unmixed drugs can be returned to the pharmacy. From our simulations, if our changes were carried out, we could save the hospital millions of dollars per year.
The purpose of my boss and co-worker’s trip, then, is to establish a bit of a relationship with the hospital (since they only know a few guys who have come to Boston), to see a bit better for themselves how things work at the hospital, and to possibly set up a test run of their proposed changes in one of the hospital’s wards, perhaps.
As Japan’s population continues to age, it’s increasingly important that costs and time are saved in places like hospitals. My boss and co-worker actually gave a presentation to Japan’s Ministry of Health yesterday, one of the Japanese government’s most important ministries.
It’s pretty exciting to see the project and be apart of it. But, let’s see if I can get this translation done…