Newsletter from the Population Health Informatics Program| March 2022
Senior Associate Dean
Student and Academic Affairs
Message
I’m happy to see the traction and engagement the PHIIRE Club is receiving with their new speaker series. This is a great opportunity for you all to ask questions outside of the classroom and facilitate this dialogue with the PHI faculty. As always, I’m here to continue supporting you on your academic and professional journey at CUNY SPH. I wish you continued luck in your classes this semester and look forward to helping those in the fieldwork class with their innovative ideas and proposals. I also want to thank the PHIIRE Club for its efforts to engage students in the program and the CUNY SPH community.
Table of Contents
- Save the Date
- Informatics News
- Research Highlight
- Student Spotlight Series
- Student Blog
- PHIIRE Club
Up-Coming PHI Talks for Which You Should Save the Date
Intermediate Healthcare Data Analytics Course
March 17, 2022 | Deadline to Apply
Healthcare organizations increasingly rely on professionals for data-driven decision making to help guide them to strategically organize and analyze medical and healthcare-related information. This course provides knowledge and skills to improve healthcare through innovative and essential techniques that enable the delivery of efficient and quality healthcare analytics. Sign up to learn how to select, prepare, analyze, interpret, evaluate and present health data related to health system performance and effectiveness. Improve problem-solving skills and your ability to lead.
March 24, 2022 | Webinar
Engage directly and privately with employers via dynamic one-on-one web chats. Discover career development resources and interactive content in virtual employer booths. Register for the event taking place March 24, 12:00 pm – 3:30 pm ET.
2022 ONC Virtual Annual Meeting
April 13-14, 2022 | Panel Sessions, Exhibit Hall, and Networking
Join us for dynamic and engaging conversations about health IT and health equity, public health, patient access, and health information exchange.
PHI In The News
Novel Informatics Approaches to COVID-19 Research: From Methods to Applications
Started in December 2019, the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) rapidly developed into a worldwide pandemic. With the spread of the more infectious Omicron variant, over 328 million cases and 5.5 million deaths were reported globally, as of January 15th 2022 [1]. During the pandemic, unprecedented effort has been devoted to research to quickly understand transmission patterns, discover underlying molecular mechanisms, develop diagnostic tests, vaccines, and treatments, and evaluate public health policies to control COVID-19. The data-driven nature of biomedical research has made Biomedical Informatics –a discipline of developing and applying information science to biomedical problems to derive information, knowledge, and wisdom from data— very critical when combating the COVID-19 pandemic [2]. Read More
A real-time integrated framework to support clinical decision making for COVID-19 patients
The COVID-19 pandemic affected healthcare systems worldwide. Predictive models developed by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and based on timely, centralized, and standardized real world patient data could improve management of COVID-19 to achieve better clinical outcomes. The objectives of this manuscript are to describe the structure and technologies used to construct a COVID-19 Data Mart architecture and to present how a large hospital has tackled the challenge of supporting daily management of COVID-19 pandemic emergency, by creating a strong retrospective knowledge base, a real time environment and integrated information dashboard for daily practice and early identification of critical condition at patient level. This framework is also used as an informative, continuously enriched data lake, which is a base for several on-going predictive studies. The information technology framework for clinical practice and research was described. It was developed using SAS Institute software analytics tool and SAS® Vyia® environment and Open-Source environment R ® and Python ® for fast prototyping and modeling. The included variables and the source extraction procedures were presented. Read More
Highlights
Data science approaches to confronting the COVID-19 pandemic: a narrative review
During the COVID-19 pandemic, more than ever, data science has become a powerful weapon in combating an infectious disease epidemic and arguably any future infectious disease epidemic. Computer scientists, data scientists, physicists and mathematicians have joined public health professionals and virologists to confront the largest pandemic in the century by capitalizing on the large-scale ‘big data’ generated and harnessed for combating the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we review the newly born data science approaches to confronting COVID-19, including the estimation of epidemiological parameters, digital contact tracing, diagnosis, policy-making, resource allocation, risk assessment, mental health surveillance, social media analytics, drug repurposing and drug development. We compare the new approaches with conventional epidemiological studies, discuss lessons we learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, and highlight opportunities and challenges of data science approaches to confronting future infectious disease epidemics. Read More
Student Spotlight
Mengting Wang is in her last year of the MS Population Health Informatics Program at CUNY SPH. She is originally from China and grew up there. When she was 25, she immigrated to the U.S.A. Living in New York City allowed her to experience a mix of culture, religion, food, and ideas, but it also showed her daily health disparities in this great city. She has been working in a non-profit health insurance company, and every day she assists lots of members who are mostly new immigrants to deal with billings, benefits, and claims. The working and living experiences in NYC brought her to the public health field. She felt that residents in Queens had limited English, and they needed more support and assistance. Therefore, she decided to change her major in China and start a new major in U.S.A. Pursuing PopHI program is beneficial to her work and understanding the American health disparities. She looks forward to graduating and applying her professional knowledge to her job. Visualizing health data and analyzing health inequalities issues are her desire in the future.
Blog Series
Review of Dr. Williams Talk
Karmen S. Williams is an Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management. She completed a post-doctorate fellowship in public and population health informatics at Indiana University and Regenstrief Institute. Her research focused on systemic informatics integration projects such as Patient-Centered Data Homes and dental and medical record integration. Dr. Williams is also actively involved in the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), where she is the Co-Chair of the Pipeline Subcommittee in the Women in AMIA, Chair of the Dental Informatics Working Group, and Director of ‘For Your Informatics’, a podcast that explores the limitless world of medical informatics. This podcast is led by the Women in AMIA, and showcases people in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) and informatics, and discusses topics relevant to success in these fields. Dr. Williams is passionate about increasing representation in STEM at the system level in all areas of informatics.
Highlights from talk
Informatics:
“The science of processing data for storage and retrieval.” “The collection, classification, storage, retrieval, and dissemination of recorded knowledge.”
BMI Areas Include:
- Health Informatics
- Clinical Informatics
- Medical Informatics
- Public Health Informatics
- Consumer Health Informatics
- Data Science
Where can your MS degree take you?
Types of Positions: Nursing Informatics Officer, Information Research Scientists, Healthcare IT project manager
Median Salary Range (2017): $80,000 – $114,520
Interested in learning more:
For Your Informatics Podcast- https://amia.org/news-publications/podcasts/for-your-informatics
American Medical Informatics Association- https://amia.org/
American Health Information Management Association: https://ahima.org/
Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society: https://www.himss.org/
International Medical Informatics Association: https://imia-medinfo.org/wp/
Population Health Informatics Innovation, Research & Education
P.H.I.I.R.E Club
On March 12, 2022 the PHIIRE Club hosted their first event for the Spring 2022 semester with the beginning of a speaker series kicked off by Dr. Williams. We thank her again for taking the time on a Saturday morning to share her experience and research in the developing field of population health informatics. She also took the opportunity to answer questions students had about her research, career opportunities, and professional development organizations. A link to the recording of the event via youtube can be found below:
There are two main events planned for the Spring semester. Our aim was to host this speaker series to introduce you to the PHI faculty and facilitate a dialogue between faculty and students outside the classroom. If you have any questions, please email phiireclub@gmail.com, if you’re interested in learning about the PHIIRE Club and how you can get involved in the club’s activities.
Please Stay Tuned for Updates!
Join us
- To submit your contributions to this newsletter, contact rafaela.villacres63@sphmail.cuny.edu
- Submit content here!
- To join the PHIIRE Club, contact phiireclub@gmail.com
- Visit Our Website
- Join the PHIIRE Club
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
