Current Research

North Carolina Preparedness and Emergency Response Research Center (NC PERRC) (2008 - present)

Edward Baker, Director of the NC Institute for Public Health, PI. The North Carolina Preparedness and Emergency Response Research Center is one of seven centers at schools of public health funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to strengthen and improve public health preparedness capacity through systems and services research. NCPERRC focuses on North Carolina public health systems and capabilities to develop and maintain sustainable preparedness and response systems. I am working on the Surveillance project, Anna Waller and Pia MacDonald , co-PIs. The goal of the surveillance project is to systematically assess the performance of timely, electronic public health surveillance systems in North Carolina and, based on the assessments, develop, implement and analyze interventions for system performance improvement. My focus is on studying the workflows and lines of communications of public health surveillance personnel.

I have also received a pilot grant from NC PERRC, "Modeling Communication Links among Public Health Emergency Preparedness Officials in North Carolina using Social Network Analysis: A Pilot Study". The goal of the study is to examine the utility of social network analysis for modeling the communication patterns of public health epidemiologists. We will use the H1N1 outbreak as a case study.

Managing Disease Through Linking Data (2008 - 2010)
David Richardson, PI. Funded by the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health Gillings Innovation Labs. The goal of this project is to develop innovative computer systems that can link and analyze patient data collected by hospitals and ambulance services, and environmental data. This more complete picture will help us identify specific intervention points for improving prevention and treatment. My focus is on modeling the semantics of the various data sources to analyze how (if) they correspond. For example, the Carolinas Poison Center, the Pre-hospital Medical Information System (PreMIS), and the hospital emergency department record a patient's symptoms in different record structures, using different terms and concepts. How can this information be merged to form a unified representation of the patient's symptoms?

Medication Reconciliation (2008 - present)
Medication reconciliation is the process of reviewing a patient's complete medication regimen, especially at transitions in care such as hospital admission or discharge, and comparing it with the regimen being considered for the new setting of care. In the Emergency Department, it can be difficult to gather complete and accurate list of medications a patient is taking. Debbie Travers, UNC School of Nursing, Jane Brice, UNC Department of Emergency Medicine, and I are studying the effectiveness of using pharmacy technicians to gather this information. My focus is on the work processes and information sources used by the technicians.

Chief Complaint and Triage Notes in the Emergency Department Patient Record
When you go to the emergency room, the triage nurse asks why you are there. The chief complaint data element of your patient record briefly records the major problem. The triage note provides more detail, including symptoms, events (such as a fall or accident), and other potentially relevant information.

• Interpretation of Temporal Expressions in Triage Notes (2007 - present)
  The triage note tells the story of what happened before you came to the emergency department. Time plays an important role in the story: How long have you had the rash? When was the accident? Which started first, the cough or the fever? In this project, we are studying how time is expressed in the triage note, with the goal of developing rules extract temporal expressions and place the associated events on a timeline.
  
• Chief Complaint (2003 - 2008)
  In a series of projects, Debbie Travers, UNC School of Nursing, who developed the Emergency Medical Text Processor (EMT-P), Anna Waller, PI of NC DETECT, Judith Tintinalli, both of UNC Department of Emergency Medicine, and I have analysed the form and content of chief complaints, with the eventual goal of developing a standardized vocabulary. Towards Vocabulary Control for Chief Complaint: A National Symposium , held October 18, 2006, resulted in a white paper (Haas et al., 2008) outlining specific recommendations for achieving this goal.

GovStat (2000 - 2005)
The GovStat Project, Gary Marchionini, UNC School of Information and Library Science, co-PI (formally known as Integration of Data and Interfaces to Enhance Human Understanding of Government Statistics: Toward the National Statistical Knowledge Network), "seeks to create an integrated model of user access to and use of US government statistical information that is rooted in realistic data models and innovative user interfaces." Our project motto is find what you need, understand what you find. My work on this project focused on the Statistical Interactive Glossary (SIG), metadata for statistical tasks, and envisioning new kinds of help for supporting users of statistics.
GovStat Papers and Presentations
Reports to the Bureau of Labor Statistics