Recap of Week Three

02/25/17

Hey everyone,

I have just wrapped up week three at Dignity Health and I have continued to progress on the few projects I am involved with. I also have been working with a few others to learn Angular Java so that we can work on a web based application in the future.

For my drug price tracking project, I have gathered up the highest expense drugs for the hospital (combination of price and quantity purchased) and compared the wholesale prices against those of retailers to ensure we charge a similar price to patients. I also presented some of this information to the chief health information officer and he seemed intrigued to look into this further.

As for the Twitter tracking, I covered most things in my previous post other than having a meeting discussing how we can turn this into a web application that the hospital can use to run analytics on certain keywords.

Finally, the genomics project is progressing as the team works to advance their idea of how we want to integrate the genetic information into the EHRs. I have also completed a laymen's guide to genomics that I will present to the IT department as an introduction to what we will be doing with genomics. I will share that presentation in a future blog post.

Comment if you have any questions about what I am working on, thank you.

Twitter Tracking

2/23/17

Hello Everyone,

I have began to experiment with an early version of the Twitter program mainly using code provided by Twitter to gather tweets associated with a certain keyword or set of keywords. I also added some of my own code just to calculate the total number of tweets, the time the program has been running, and the average tweets per minute over  that interval. While testing it during some of my other tasks, I noticed very little buzz surrounding some of the topics I was testing just for my own interests such as "genomics" or "genome" but nearly 2200 tweets per minute when I included the keyword "Trump". It essentially became my test keyword as I knew I would always pull in lots of data to make sure my algorithms work correctly. I will hopefully be adding a user interface as well as the ability for the program to log some of the data. Currently, I have to edit the code to change the codewords and read the console for my information, almost like just browsing the Twitter homepage. It is a good start, but I have lots of work to do, but with the help of some of the experienced individuals at Dignity, I know it will be doable.

Let me know if you have any questions about what I am doing and thanks for reading my blog.

Kyle Grace

Recap of Week Two

2/19/17

The main focus of my project is Big Data, and I have realized not all of my readers or people in general know what Big Data really is, so I think in this post I will explain it in the context of my second week.

Big Data is essentially just a large amount of information that we can store electronically now using the latest technology. This is data stored about an insane number of individuals or a very high number of data points surrounding a certain topic. In my field this is going to be genomes and their attached clinical data, tweets and the sentiment of their contents, as well as the different drug purchase transactions for the hospitals Dignity Health is connected with. We can analyze these data using software to draw conclusions that we could never before when we couldn't even handle this much data. Imagine trying to cross reference hundreds of thousands of health records to see which gene will lead to a disease in 20 years by hand, impossible. Now, we can create programs that will sift through the data and allow us to find what is important and do the thinking, offloading the time-consumig labour onto the computer. This is the power of technology and Big Data, it is emerging now as one of the strongest tools of our time. With Big Data, we can improve the lives of people and provide companies with feedback or information they never could have hoped to gather before, and at Dignity Health they are vying to be on the forefront of Big Data science.

Twitter Big Data

2/19/17

I have began to work on the Twitter project that will hopefully be the final product of my internship here. Another developer here has a similar system set up only it maps the tweets geographically as they are tweeted out. We saw the United States light up with tweets of Donald Trump, but nearly none about genomics or precision medicine, although I won't say I was surprised.

This project is going to very useful for aggregating the overall thoughts facing nearly any issue or subject all by using the power of Twitter. While it is normally seen as something negative, social media is incredibly powerful in the modern era. As we now have the ability to store and process the immense amount of data, we can use it to better the experience of patients in the future or use a program like this for nearly infinite applications. I hope to tell you more soon as I dive into the code.

Kyle Grace 

Introduction

2/12/17

Hello Everyone,

As I began my time at Dignity Health this week, I thought I'd give a little overview of what I will be involved with during my few months here.

I discovered, from my first moments interacting with my team, that technology and big data have revolutionized the way we analyze society in diseases or even feedback. They seek to improve our understanding of diseases and better the care for each individual by compiling their genetic information and medical records and comparing it against other people to understand what the best approach is for their situation. While it may seem obvious, it is amazing what they are doing to improve the care for patients at their hospitals, like St.Joseph's. I am incredibly excited to become a part of the whole experience and get my hands dirty in the field working on programs and projects to push their efforts forward.

I will work with Big Data to leverage cutting edge technology that allows us to use all the data that is captured about patients and their treatment, as well as pulling in Twitter data to discover the overall sentiment felt towards St.Joseph's. This is an area where technology truly has the opportunity to better the lives of us all.

Thank you,
I can't wait to get started.

Kyle Grace

Recap of Week One

2/12/17

Well, I finished my first week. It was a mixture of emotions from initial boredom to great excitement. I was exposed to some of the awesome projects I will be involved in and I now am both ecstatic and scared to have things thrown at me that I've never seen before.

The main thing that I have been involved with this first week was a project involving the application of the human genome. Dignity Health is focused on combining the study of the human genome with electronic health records to better process, store, and combine this information to provide treatment that is specifically tailored to the genetic makeup of each patient. Very cool stuff. It is called precision medicine, and while they may not be the only ones working to better this field, the enthusiasm I have experienced truly excites me.

I spent a large amount of my time brushing up on my knowledge of genomics from AP Biology and furthering it more by discovering how they can use Big Data to reference genetic information of one person against thousands of previous patients to discover what the most successful course of action has been for people of similar genetic makeup. I am creating a sort-of guide to genomics that will better help the IT department understand them as well as solidify my own knowledge so I can have a strong base of knowledge moving forward. Understanding genomics itself, I believe, is vital for me to contribute in the beginning stages of creating a system to leverage Big Data in healthcare by integrating genomics.

Thanks for checking in, and I'll see you in my next post.

Kyle Grace