From about 2015 through 2021 my day job was as a data scientist for multiple prominent healthcare companies. Being a data scientist in the healthcare space tended to be a bit more, shall we say ‘practical’, than in pure tech firms. That said, there was often the chance to have an actual positive impact on people’s wellbeing, so that was quite nice. I’m a big proponent of FOSS and its power to elevate the community, so whenever I build something that I think might do so I hope to write it up here.
Currently there are a lot of healthcare analysts being asked to generate things like HEDIS or URAC measures for the first time, and the tools in their box are historically SQL and Excel. When they look online, if they’re lucky a lot of what they find are fairly dense SAS conference papers. I hope that stumbling here and finding some open source solutions for what they need will be of some help. Right now my publication list is limited to the PDC library I open-sourced after the third time I was asked to build out support for a medication adherence program.