PMean: What I did in the last twelve months

Steve Simon

2018/09/19

For the yearly evaluation for my part-time position in the Department of Biomedical and Health Informatics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, I have had to prepare a list of accomplisments and goals for the upcoming year. I thought that I’d share this year’s list on my blog.

Accomplishments: I prepared two articles for the Encyclopedia of Big Data, Springer (in press). The first is a summary of the large nationally representative surveys conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The second is a summary of big data sources and geographic information at the Bureau of the Census.

I gave two big presentations. The first was an invited talk at the 2017 Applied Stochastic Modeling and Data Analysis conference in London, England, “Simulation before, during, and after a clinical trial: A Bayesian approach.” The second was a contributed talk at the 2018 Cerner Statistics conference, “Mining the Electronic Health Record. Why and How.”

My work ended on the PCORI research grant, The Greater Plains Collaborative, but this work carried over onto the CTSA grant, Frontiers, University of Kansas Clinical and Translational Science Institute. I am supported at 11% effort on this grant with the goal of encouraging more utilization of research using the electronic health record at academic institutions and hospitals in the Kansas City region.

I carried an overload of classes (at least relative to a 25% faculty appointment), teaching two sections of MEDB5505, Introduction to R, a section of MEDB 5506, Introduction to SPSS, and a section of MEDB 5507, Introduction to SAS. I am also co-developing a new course, Introduction to SQL, with another member of our department. I took and passed the Faculty Online Certification class and attended two FaCET conferences.

I helped with the planning of a big data/data science initiative at UMKC, and helped introduce medical students to the analysis of Health Facts data sets. I provided informal guidance to three PhD students working at the Center for Economic Information and one PhD student in the Department of Psychology. I gave a talk on writing research grants for the UMKC Writing Studio.

Goals: My goals for the upcoming year are to complete work on the Introduction to SQL class, adapt the online classes MEDB 5505, 5506, and 5507 to meet ADA requirements, and submit a research grant to study Bayesian simulation of clinical trials.