SITE: UCSD HEALTH INFORMATION SERVICES

Week One: February 27 – March 6, 2022

Type of experience: Remote
Total Hours this week: 2
Running total hours at this location: 2
Running total hours of all practicum experiences: 2

Week Three: March 14 – March 18, 2022

Type of experience: Remote
Total Hours this week: 7.5
Running total hours at this location: 9.5
Running total hours of all practicum experiences: 11

This week I got to sit in on some meetings and began training/onboarding for what we

hope to accomplish over the coming weeks. I sat in on daily huddles with the Enterprise

Population Health team on Tuesday and Friday to see the type of projects and work that each

member is working on. I discussed with my preceptor the plan to catalogue and organize the

170+ registries that provide data for clinicians. Some of the trainings I completed this week

included courses on data governance, privacy and security, and an EPIC session for ambulatory

clinical staff. I thought it was a very good experience for me to get some exposure using EPIC

and get some more understanding about the clinician side of care. It was also great to be able

to meet some of the team and those with roles that I hope to pursue one day. I look forward to

picking their brains and gaining insight in terms of technical skills, the industry in general, etc.

This week was mostly building the foundation for the work that I will be able to do throughout

this practicum, and I am so excited to finally get going and help out the team.
 SITE: UCSD HEALTH INFORMATION SERVICES

Week Four: March 21 – March 25, 2022

Type of experience: Remote
Total Hours this week: 2.5
Running total hours at this location: 12
Running total hours of all practicum experiences: 14

This week I sat-in on several more daily huddles to continue to meet those on the

Quality Reporting team and get more acquainted with the type of work and projects they are

currently involved with. I had another meeting this week going in depth on a particular patient

registry that displays the data for over 500,000 active patients in the UCSD system. The registry

displays all parts of patient’s care, such as provider location, primary diagnosis, insurance

information, etc. The registry was created using tools that we have learned throughout this

program, such as SQL to retrieve data and Tableau to visualize it. It is cool to see some of the

programs and techniques that we’ve learned in class be put to actual use in the field. Once the

registry is completed, I will be assigned to do some testing with it to check for things like all the

numbers adding up, the filters working, and all the tables/charts making sense.

I also had another meeting discussing a potential project that would create a catalogue

for each of the over 150 registries at UCSD. This library would categorize the registries by

particular metrics and make it easier for users to find certain patients or data. I am hoping that

this project will be able to come into fruition and to use it as part of my Capstone project.
 SITE: UCSD HEALTH INFORMATION SERVICES

Week Five: March 28 – April 1, 2022

Type of experience: Remote
Total Hours this week: 11 hours
Running total hours at this location: 23 hours
Running total hours of all practicum experiences: 25 hours

This week I worked on project to help create a one-stop shop document that contains

existing standards, rules, and policies. I was given a number of previous presentations,

trainings, and meeting agendas dating back to 2020 and was asked to extract any relevant

information that would be categorized as a standard or policy. I then revised the guidelines and

added them to a page via the UCSD Confluence site that serves as a center for all

documentation. Each standard was categorized by topic, such as guidelines for SQL, Tableau,

etc., and I tried to include as many links, illustrations, and charts as possible to give better

visualizations of the information. Hopefully this will streamline the process for users to find

particular department policies and other important information.

I also had another meeting to further discuss the registry metric catalogue that will

hopefully make up my Capstone project. We talked about the necessity to have a tool that will

keep track of the hundreds of registry metrics that UCSD has in order to keep them current,

updated, or eliminated if there is no longer a need for it. It’s a large undertaking by the team

that will probably take months to complete, but I’m glad I could be around for its inception and

hopefully its eventual completion.

 SITE: UCSD HEALTH INFORMATION SERVICES

Week Six: April 4 – April 8, 2022

Type of experience: Remote
Total Hours this week: 6 hours
Running total hours at this location: 29 hours
Running total hours of all practicum experiences: 31 hours

This week was similar to the last one, continuing to sit in on meetings and getting a feel

for the daily operations of the population health team and the types of projects that they are

currently working on. The more I sit in on meetings and familiarize myself with different roles

and types of work, the more confident I feel that I would be interested and excel in this type of

position. I am hopeful that post-graduation that I am able to find a similar role to the one that I

am currently in.

This week I continued to discuss potential routes for my Capstone project and figuring

out the exact plan of action toward its completion. I also assisted in reviewing a Visio diagram

that displays each of the 170+ patient registries that UCSD Health has. The illustration was a

web showing how each of the registries are grouped and connected, and it’s an overwhelming

document with a lot to grasp, especially upon first glance. The diagram had not been reviewed

in about 8 months, so it was due for some revision. Using the Visio document, I cross-

referenced it with the list of current active registries in Epic to make sure the connections are

correct, making note of new registries that need to be added to the Visio as well as registries

that are no longer in use and must be removed.

 SITE: UCSD HEALTH INFORMATION SERVICES

Week Seven: April 11 – April 15, 2022

Type of experience: Remote
Total Hours this week: 7 hours
Running total hours at this location: 36 hours
Running total hours of all practicum experiences: 38 hours

This week I spent the majority of my time working on some things related to my registry

metrics library Capstone project. The team member that has been the lead on this project used

a SQL query to draw the desired registry metric information from Epic and into an Excel file.

Information that was extracted included the name and ID of each registry metric, the registry

name and its ID where it is found, the metric description, whether it’s active or inactive,

amongst other data elements. I spent some time filtering through the metrics that were listed

as inactive and compared them to their actual data in an Epic environment. I kept track of some

anomalies and potential errors to give to my preceptor for further review. I have enjoyed being

able gain experience working with tools such as Excel and Epic environments, as they are

domains that I will likely need to have some skills in once I enter the field. I hope that I will be

around long enough to see the completion of this registry metric project, although it may take

some time. As for the actual Capstone project assignments, I plan on suggesting

recommendations for the project’s completion rather than wait for some kind of deliverable.
 SITE: UCSD HEALTH INFORMATION SERVICES

Week Eight: April 18 – April 22, 2022

Type of experience: Remote
Total Hours this week: 4 hours
Running total hours at this location: 40 hours
Running total hours of all practicum experiences: 42 hours

This week was a fairly quiet one, as I continued to attend daily “touchbase” meetings

and worked on some Excel cleaning in regard to the registry metric project. I spent a good

amount of time working on my actual Capstone project assignments, which will be based on the

registry metric project, but since this actual one at UCSD will take some time to complete, I will

be providing recommendations and best steps for my USD paper and poster. It will be

interesting to compare how I think the project will play out in my paper to how it will actually

(hopefully) be completed at UCSD, given that I’m around long enough to see its completion.

I am still enjoying being able to sit in on meetings and just observe what the population

health team deals with on a daily basis, ranging from huge reporting projects that get sent

throughout the organization to troubleshooting smaller issues that pop up in the Epic system.

While much of the terminology is still foreign to me, I do feel like this type of role is something I

would enjoy and excel in if given the opportunity and time.

 SITE: UCSD HEALTH INFORMATION SERVICES

Week Nine: April 25 – April 29, 2022

Type of experience: Remote
Total Hours this week: 4 hours
Running total hours at this location: 44 hours
Running total hours of all practicum experiences: 46 hours

This week was another quiet one, but it allowed me time to work on the registry metric

Excel sheet and my related Capstone project. I spent some time working with a member of the

team to learn about the Excel function “XLOOKUP”, which searches through selected columns

to find the values that match up with a particular lookup value. For instance, we were trying to

populate the registry metric groupers from one extract in an Excel sheet to a separate sheet

with the rest of the registry metric information. Because each export has thousands of rows,

there was no way to search for each metric and input the groupers manually. “XLOOKUP”

allowed us to use a shared value, in this case the Rule ID, to search for that metric’s groupers

and populate them in the desired sheet. It was a very useful tool in Excel that I had not heard of

before that made the process so much easier.

I also sat in on a presentation regarding Tableau that explained certain tools and how

UCSD continues to leverage the application in different ways. I always enjoyed using Tableau in

class and being able to visualize data in interesting and insightful ways. I hope that whatever

future role I may have would allow me to use a skill like Tableau for reporting.
 SITE: UCSD HEALTH INFORMATION SERVICES

Week Ten: May 2 – May 6, 2022

Type of experience: Remote
Total Hours this week: 1 hour
Running total hours at this location: 45 hours
Running total hours of all practicum experiences: 47 hours

Once again, this week was slow for me at UCSD, with only our daily meetings in the

morning and keeping up to date with some of the ongoing projects for the population health

team. I talked to my preceptor regarding a potential job at UCSD once school is completed, and

she sent my resume to her director. I am hopeful that there will be an opportunity available for

me to stay on following school, especially one in which I can gain additional training and hands-

on experience with different projects, applications, etc.

This week I also had the chance to present the current state of my Capstone registry

metric project to my cohort. This includes an explanation of UCSD’s registries and their metrics,

what is missing in terms of a library for displaying relevant metric information, and our current

(tentative) plan for the project, which includes a SQL query to extract necessary info and

leveraging Collibra for data cataloging. The presentation was well received by my classmates

and professors, and it makes me more excited to see what the final deliverable for this project

could turn out to be. Again, I am hopeful that I will remain at UCSD long enough to assist in the

project’s completion.