Category: Matthew F – Duke Institute for Health Innovation

Today was the day of the presentation. I met with the entire DIHI team in the meeting room and began the open-ended discussion about my presentation. I got a lot of compliments on the detail of my project and heard other opinions in the room. Overall my presentation experience was amazing and I feel like my hard work paid off. Mr.Balu was very grateful for my card and gift and I think I have made a relationship with him that will last. This experience has been great for me and I’m excited to carry it on into the summer.

 

 

Today I spent more of my day focusing on my final project. I didn’t have any meetings so today was focused on staying on task and doing more research. I have discovered a lot of fascinating things about health systems looking to become carbon neutral. What I found was that only one hospital in the US actually achieved this goal. For hospitals, I discovered quickly so many of their daily operations rely on the use of carbon energy. However, I have been pondering solutions which I plan to start putting into a presentation next week that I think the team will like. Many of which include the hospital saving money, becoming more efficient, and ultimately reaching the goal of 0 carbon emissions.

Today I spent most of the day following Mr.Balu through his meetings. Once again, I got to meet with more and more team members. In fact, one conversation went so well today I was invited to join the team over the summer. The more I spend time with this team the more I realize how much of an impact they have on public health. After looking through this year’s projects, there are many which sparked an interest in me. Some of these include monitoring gun violence in Durham, using AI to create a better navigation system for EMS, and creating a new system for recording the last conversations between doctors and dying patients.

Here’s a cool hat I got today.

Today was a day of reflection at duke so there was no meetings or assigned work. I took today to focus more on my research project, how to help duke health become carbon neutral in the next 5 years. Through my research, I have learned a lot of very fascinating things about how hospitals around the world are trying to promote and act with environmentally friendly habits. At the end of my work experience, Mr.Balu has requested that I make a presentation on my findings to him and the DIHI team which they will use in a much bigger conference with the prior chancellor of duke health.

Today I spent most of my day having individual meetings with each of the team members. Throughout all of these meetings, I learned that DIHI’s main focus lies around improving health equity and accessibility. Unknown to me,  the US currently utilizes a very underwhelming health care program. In fact, the average spending on health care is $11k per capita. When I learned this fact, I realized how important the jobs of the people working in DIHI are. In the most recent project, sepsis watch, they are able to use a set of models to predict if someone will become septic. This innovation has shown positive results with data suggesting that it has saved many lives. This field of work is so interesting because it combines medicine, tech, and business and promotes the wellbeing of American health while also making a profit for the health care system.

Today was day one and I was introduced to the entire DIHI team. After starting off the day with several innovation camp-fire meetings, I was quickly acquainted with several of the projects that DIHI is working on. During several conversations with different team members, I learned a lot about the data science role that DIHI serves to duke. During a meeting with the chief of data science, Bradley detailed the variety of projects that he was working on and explained to me his interest in his career. DIHI is a small community which is evident when seeing how closely everyone interacts with each other at the office. The workplace and experience is really amazing there and everyone is very willing to help and teach about the things that they do every day.