Abstract:
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed crucial technical deficiencies in healthcare systems while bringing epidemiologic methods to the center of attention for the general public. Three years ago, I dove in to the murky pool of healthcare data providers, pharmaceutical companies, regulatory agencies, care provider networks, academic research groups, and related software vendors through my consulting role at Exponent. Join me for an overview of my journey from experimental particle physics to data science consulting. I will share my experience working with hundreds of clients across multiple sectors, and explain why physicists make the best data scientists. Focusing on my work in health data science and pharmacoepidemiology, I will introduce some core concepts in epidemiology and how I think about them from the perspective of a physicist. I will discuss a major project to aggregate and harmonize electronic health record data from 10,000+ nursing home facilities across the U.S. to enable public health surveillance, care coordination, and research, on a nationwide scale.