As my graduate journey wraps up at Illinois Tech this May, I can honestly say that CS 595: Digital Healthcare Informatics wasn’t just my final course but my most unexpectedly rewarding one. Even though I signed up thinking it will just be another elective, something to end my degree with. Unexpectedly, it pushed me out of my comfort zone, all while giving me hands-on experience with real healthcare data which made me rethink and gave me a glimpse of what computer science can actually do in the real world.
I worked with the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) team where we are focused on transforming raw, fragmented healthcare dataset into the OMOP Common Data Model, the universal standard that is used by hospitals and researchers to analyze population’s health in a more effective way. Obviously at first, it might not seem that glamorous especially when parsing messy CSVs, dealing with edge cases in patient records, writing ETL pipelines in Python and SQL. But as we loaded it all into OMOP and saw how it helps in populating tools like ATLAS, it started to become interesting as we are trying to make inefficient healthcare data more usable for research and AI applications as this the data which helps doctors and researchers to make progress in their research. The more accurate the data, the better will be the result.
Unlike most CS courses, this wasn’t at all about acing exams or making small tweaks to an algorithm, but about some real-world healthcare challenge basically full of messy, nuanced and full of edge cases. We are trying to solve the problem while following privacy rules like HIPAA, using standards like FHIR and OMOP, tools like Synth, PostgreSQL, and ATLAS. Even discussion about ethics, compliance and data interoperability, everything we did had a purpose which I personally feel is rare in an academic setting.
One thing that was extra special was how approachable experts were to guide us and keep us on the right track. With absence of long lectures, it felt more like a startup incubator than a traditional course where we worked in sprints while collaborating in teams, iterating codes and presenting working prototypes. I don’t think it would have been possible without the help of Leap of Faith Technologies, who partnered with the institute for this course, which motivated everyone even more to work harder.
I could have taken a theory-heavy elective or research paper to end my time at Illinois Tech, but instead I got to:
- Learn about practical healthcare data engineering
- Collaborate on projects that connect artificial intelligence to real-world patient care
- Positively contribute to something that might one day support doctors, patients, and researchers all over the world.
As I am all set to graduate this May, I leave not just with a degree but also a great project that I am genuinely proud of, a toolkit I know will be useful, and a sense of purpose that will guide me as I take my next step into the industry.