Who we are
My name is Ian Stockwell, PhD, an Associate Professor of Information Systems at UMBC. I also serve as the Associate Director of Healthcare Research in the College of Engineering and Information Technology and liaison to The Hilltop Institute, a university research center dedicated to improving the health and wellbeing of people and communities. I started the Health Data Lab to continue what I have been doing my whole career: use data to improve the quality of healthcare.
What we do
HDL studies the implementation of technology-driven efforts to improve efficiency in the healthcare system. Our motto is “Partner, Implement, Evaluate” (PIE) … we want to study solutions used by real providers caring for real patients. We start by identifying structural gaps with the current standard of care, which can be caused by unaligned incentives at the payer level, inefficient provider workflows, or lack of interoperability between health information systems. We then identify partners like hospitals, health plans, and health information exchanges that serve enough patients where fixing the problem could make a measurable difference in their care. Next is the fun part: developing a technological solution to the problem through predictive modeling and machine learning, along with a corresponding workflow, then implementing the result. Finally we measure what happened; did we help people and, if so, how much? Either way we end with a blueprint, one that can be used to scale the solution across the nation or serve as a warning to others that before they spend resources on something that doesn’t work.
Who we need
Over the coming year HDL will be submitting multiple large research proposals to the National Institutes of Health. We need help putting those proposals together and getting the work done if we win them. The ideal candidate is a graduate student with experience in both healthcare and data science who loves to write and wants to help people. A deep understanding of the US healthcare system is a plus but not required.
Interested?
Please send your resume, two writing samples, and a paragraph about why you want to fix healthcare to istock1@umbc.edu. It may take me a while to get back to you, but I promise I will.