"My name is Silis Jiang.
I'm a PhD student here at Columbia University.
I work at the Medical Center where I study how doctors communicate and use the electronic
health worker.
Recently there's been a lot of shifts in terms of how clinicians are practicing.
They are going from this practicing by themselves to practicing in a team.
What that means is when a patient comes in a patient will see many doctors or many nurses.
Often times three or four doctors or nurses in ones visit.
It's really important that all of these physicians, nurses, and other care team members are able
to keep track of one another and know what each other is doing.
In around 2000 or so there was this big new initiative where they found that lots of medical
errors were happening because of miscommunications in the hospital.
That's really what I'm trying to focus on.
I'm trying to do it by implementing new IT tools that help steer or direct how they communicate
so it's in a more efficient way.
I was born in China but I moved to the U.S. when I was pretty young.
I went to high school and college in Ohio.
At Ohio State I was a psychology major.
That's when I really started getting interested in how do people think.
How do people behave in groups.
Then I slowly made a transition into studying how doctors do that and how nurses do that.
That eventually led me into this field.
During college all of my mentors said if you want to go to medical school you should really
focus on doing some research because that's what you're lacking right now.
At first I started just doing some bench side research.
I also volunteered with the emergency department's clinical research team.
It was there that I started using the computer systems that they had where they collected
all of the patient information.
I started seeing problems with all of the computer systems.
I would click through and I would find that the patient has lots of missing data or I
would click through and just never find the patient even though I could see him in the
emergency room right beside me.
I would just feel like how are these problems possible.
Then I found out that there was actually an entire field dedicated to this.
I really just jumped right in.
This is a very new field.
That's the great thing about science.
There's always something new.
Doctors, they're very busy.
They're busy healing people.
But what actually needs a lot of healing itself is the actual healthcare process.
That really captured me and said ""This is the problem that I want to work on.""
That's how I got my start.
Even today that's what drives me.
Right now I'm focusing on a specific area of communication.
It's called multidisciplinary rounds.
This is a meeting where many types of care providers meet with one another.
This will include a patient's doctors, their nurse, a social worker, and whoever else is
involved in their care.
They actually get together every single day and discuss what's going on with the patients.
What changes there have been.
However, this is not a very well supported meeting.
They just meet and spend a lot of their time just digging through their notes.
It's very time intensities.
What I'm trying to do is actually bring tools that will help them find the patient information
that they want faster and more efficiently so that when they do have this meeting they
can be very efficient.
Right now this is a chart of when doctors are writing notes in the hospital.
There's this common myth, I think, that scientists are these really nerdy people who are socially
shy and just sit in a dark room all day.
Being a scientist is actually the exact opposite of what the stereotype is.
It's great because I'm never just working by myself.
It's always part of a team.
I'm always talking to teams of doctors.
It's not just feeling myself smile when I see doctors using the tool but it's actually
seeing the doctors be less frustrated at work.
Or it's actually seeing patients get better because my research is actually turning into
something.
In terms of why anyone should do research - everyone actually.
We're all very curious.
We all want to ask questions.
Being able to watch your answers turn into solutions it's really satisfying and it's
really motivating.
I really think that not all professions can say that this is what their day is like."