My Second and Final Project

In the summer of 2013 I was lucky enough to be referred to the Department of Public Health for a paid internship. The experience was pretty awesome, and I was happy to see Health Policy in action at a government level in the US.

Through my work at DPH I started working a little bit on Serious Reportable Events which are basically "adverse events" which are considered to be "never events". They are called never events because they are supposed to happen NEVER. Some examples of SREs are falls, pressure sores, wrong site surgeries, wrong surgeries and all sorts of pretty bad things that we would never think happens in hospitals.

By law hospitals have to report these never events to DPH. Each adverse event is logged by a hospital staff person on a form, which includes the person's name, address, DOB, illness they were admitted with, ethnic origin, race, language, what time the event occurred, what kind of harm the event caused the patient, and all sorts of other information.

DPH enters the data into a program, and then compiles the data into excel sheets. These excel sheets only list the name of the hospital and the number of each SRE they reported in a particular year. This information is then released to the public on the DPH website.

The data has a geographic aspect to it in that hospitals can be located on a state map, and a time factor to them because the data is presented in annual sheets. The data is also broken out by acute and non acute hospitals. 

Prof. Offenhuber helped me zone in on this already available data which means I don't have to wait for someone to release data to me. The data is simple, which will allow me to focus on learning the intricacies of various programs.

I am back to being excited!

It took a while.

I took this class for a number of reasons.
1. I do not wish to be an academic and this course seemed like a good way to gain some new skills which would be beneficial to me in the "field".
2. I was exciting about learning some things that were new.
3. "Big Data" sounded important. The world is changing, and I better understand these new things if I wanted to stay relevant.

So, I met with Prof. Offenhuber who assured me that the class would be interesting, not too technical and that my "goals" would be satisfied. I signed up. During the winter break I was super excited.

Then, school started back up, I started teaching and as the initial excitement of being back in school wore off, the work started piling up, and this class started to look really scary.

I have a habit of over reaching. I think about doing really cool things, I get carried away, and I often go beyond the scope of the task that was at hand.

 In our second class Prof. Offenhuber introduced us to a journalism class and we were given the opportunity to team up with a journalism student and work on a story. I got carried away, talked about sex selective abortions in immigrant communities, imagined that we could do something really cool with big data in Boston and either prove or disprove the hypothesis. Sure enough the flash caught the ear of a student and we started working together. Slowly, the project got blown way out of proportion, and started looking more like a thesis. The thesis started freaking me out. And, I went running to my department asking if there was any way I could drop the class without a W on my transcript.

Thankfully, my department chair and administrative assistant told me to suck it up and go for it. I went and met with Prof. Offenhuber who brought me back on track and helped me focus and find another project.

R freaked me out a little bit. But, I've been playing around on Tableau all day today and I am happy to say that I am very excited to learn how to do these cool things again. Rini is back on earth!