Today was our first day of work knowing our project assignments, and it was an exciting one. I started the morning of meeting with my research partner Sergio (you can check out his blog here), and our PhD mentor Tom Ongwere to learn more about the Discordant Chronic Comorbidities (also known as DCC) project. Tom filled us in on all the work that he has done on the project, and gave us a lot more details on what we will be doing for the next 9 weeks.

Sergio and I will start by reading lots of papers on similar projects so that we have a better understanding of the project. Once we receive IRB approval (meaning that we are approved to handle patient data), we will start going through interview transcripts, looking for themes and pulling out meaningful quotes as well as doing other qualitative analysis. We will also work on writing two separate papers with Tom – one on the information learned from the patients, and a second one on information learned from the healthcare providers. We will then move on to create a focus group of several healthcare providers, where we hope to learn from them what they think patients should have to help them better manage multiple conditions. Using that information we hope to create a participatory design workshop, where patients will be able to provide feedback on what sort of tools they would find helpful. If we get through all of this (and still have time left), we will then work on analyzing our results and beginning to prototype a tool that fits the needs of the patients and the healthcare providers. We have a lot of work ahead of us, but it should be fun!

After our meeting with Tom, we headed to the ProHealth design meeting. This is a weekly meeting where everyone who is available in the ProHealth group gathers to share what they have done that week and what they hope to accomplish in the next week. The meeting was a nice chance to hear about everyone’s work, and to see all the amazing work that is happening in the ProHealth lab!

Tom, Sergio, and I then had a quick meeting with one of our faculty mentors, James Clawson. We went over the plan for the week, and discussed what we were planning to include in our elevator pitches that we would be delivering at our afternoon tea. We left the meeting to continue working on our elevator pitches, and spent the afternoon working on those and starting to read relevant papers.

We ended the day by gathering for our first ProHealth Tea. Every other week everyone comes together to end the day with a snack (this week we had an amazing chocolate cake from Blu Boy Chocolate) and to discuss the meetings theme. This weeks theme was elevator pitches, and we all delivered our elevator pitches to the group. You can read my pitch below.

Hi, I’m Gabrielle Cantor and I’m a rising sophomore at Indiana University studying Intelligent Systems Engineering. I’m interested in autonomous development to impact individuals health and daily lives. As a ProHealth REU student I am working with Patrick, James, Tom, and Sergio to look at how patients and medical providers prioritize treatment and management of discordant chronic comorbidities, which are multiple chronic conditions that have differing treatment instructions. By specifically studying patients with Type 2 Diabetes and other chronic conditions, we are working to develop a tool to help patients manage multiple treatment plans and facilitate communication between multiple doctors. Our ultimate goal is to design in a way that will empower patients to take control of their own health.

Thanks to the presence of an impartial judge (in the form of a CS grad student), prizes were given out to the top 3 speeches. Ciabhan took 3rd place, my awesome roommate Kate took 2nd, and I took 1st! It was a lot of fun, and I know Kate and I are looking forward to getting more sweets from Blu Boy for our apartment with the gift cards we won (thanks Prof. Siek)!

Our first week at ProHealth has been an exciting one, and I can’t wait to keep working on our projects. We have a lot of work ahead of us, but it should be a fun summer!