• Job Type: Short Term Casual
• Bargaining Unit:
• Regular/Temporary: Temporary
• End Date if Temporary:
• Hours Per Week: 10
• Standard Work Schedule: Monday - Friday
• Building: PH-20
• Salary Range: $22.00 - $22.00

Position Summary

The Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University is seeking to hire a Student Research Worker to support a research project entitled "Integrating EHR and patient-generated health data for breast cancer risk assessment and decision support in a diverse multiethnic population". This project is funded by the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD). This is one of the informatics-driven decision-support interventions for breast cancer prevention in the lab of Drs. Kukafka and Crew.

Research Overview: Women identified as high-risk for breast cancer (BC) may benefit from personalized risk-reducing strategies; however, barriers exist, including the time required to conduct a risk assessment of each woman in a population. Electronic health records (EHRs), a common source for populating risk assessment models, present challenges, including missing data, and data types more accurate when provided by patients compared to EHRs. We previously extracted EHR data on age, race/ethnicity, family history of BC, benign breast disease, and breast density to calculate BC risk according to the Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium (BCSC) model among 9,514 women. Comparing self-reported and EHR data, more women with a first-degree family history of BC (14.6% vs. 4.4%) and benign breast biopsies (21.3% vs. 11.3%) were identified with patient-reported data, but EHR data identified more women with atypia or lobular carcinoma in situ (1.1% vs. 2.3%). The EHR had missing data on race/ethnicity for 26.8% of women and on first-degree family history of BC for 87.2%. Opportunely, Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), application programming interfaces (APIs), and new legislation offer an elegant solution for automated BC risk assessment that integrates both patient-generated health data and EHR data to harness the strengths of each approach. To increase the likelihood of developing disseminatable and equitable strategies that integrate EHR and patient-generated health data for risk assessment and personalized BC risk reduction, the focus of this project is to refine and test our approach among diverse multiethnic women. Our three aims are to 1) upgrade FHIR integration of a patient decision aid (RealRisks), parse the EHR data pulled by patients, develop a user interface to enable women to view, modify and augment their EHR data, and conduct user evaluations of the user interface; 2) assess the effect of the FHIR-enhanced Real Risks patient decision aid on patient activation, risk perception, and usability in a pilot study of multiethnic high-risk women; and 3) identify multilevel barriers to implementing FHIR-enhanced patient decision aid into clinical care.

Responsibilities

The incumbent will support the multidisciplinary team by 1) conducting qualitative interviews to elicit women's knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes, for example, their understanding and comfort with accessing and viewing their EHR data for BC risk assessment; 2) assist the team to design a user interface that reflects findings from the qualitative interviews after data is coded and analyzed; 3) recruit participants for the study aims; 4) code and analyze qualitative data; 5) assist in managing study related forms including surveys; 6) participating in all aspects of the pilot study including consenting study participants; 7) assist with writing results for publication and progress reports; 8) participating in team meetings; 9) other duties as assigned.

Minimum Qualifications

Bachelor's degree or equivalent in education and experience.

Other Requirements

• Current student at Columbia University and its affiliates.
• Strong interest in the mission of the research project and willingness to work flexible hours to reach study participants.
• Previous experience with conducting interviews and qualitative coding.
• Capacity to commit to 2 consecutive semesters, with a minimum of 10 hours per week
• Should be organized, thorough, maintain good records, and able to work independently
• Fluency in Spanish a plus.