Trench Notes: The Shift

"Zen Masters"

At some point, a health informaticist will have to run the gamut of technological proficiency and medical prowess, thereby becoming the proverbial zen masters pop culture likes to refer to so much. Or at least, be able to touch nearly every corner from either ends of the technical and medical realms.

But until then, I'll just stick to internships set up by the Medical Informatics Unit (known from hereon out as "The Unit". I know, so MI6/CIA-esque) just this past highly lengthy summer term of AY 2013-2014. Being the foolish "bano" that I was (and part-time workaholic and career junkie), I decided to sign up for two out of three of the programs setup, namely the development of UP MSHI website, and EMR implementations in PGH.

Let me tell you that none of them really took off from that moment. It's summer time, you know. People are out, doing summer stuff. Don't bug 'em. That was how it went well into the first two months of the summer (UP had the grandest instance of acquiring five months' worth of vacay time since it made the move of changing its acad calendar to August to match with everybody else in the world. Globalization, that kinda stuff).

Fast forward to August and much has been done from both of the programs, albeit inconsistently. The MSHI website has taken much shape, although sill having some challenge taking a real form. There had been some considerable discussion with what the actual content for the website will be. Hopefully, we'll get past this hurdle since it seems that that's all that's left.

The EMR implementations at PGH have taken to a rather slow but steady pace of progress, especially with the recent development of a fixed weekly schedule of attendance at the hospital. The group's still working things out with the first assignment within the program, which was to sort out encoding issues with ECG department.

As if that wasn't enough, the school year's back in action. Being so self-inflicting of getting pressed for time, I enrolled in another set of four subjects much like the last time from November to March. The difference? More individual work, with very little opportunity to incorporate ideas from a subject to another. Yeah, it's a challenge. But one has to up the ante every now and then.

Speaking of upping the ante, I apparently got invited last March by a classmate to be speaker at one of their postgraduate lectures this month. Funny enough, the topic's apparently a double Waterloo for me. Not having total experience or even adequate exposure in both the technical and medical parts, up to now I still wonder why I agreed to doing this lecture by this coming Saturday... oh right, just to try it.

"Zen Masters"

At some point, a health informaticist will have to run the gamut of technological proficiency and medical prowess, thereby becoming the proverbial zen masters pop culture likes to refer to so much. Or at least, be able to touch nearly every corner from either ends of the technical and medical realms.

But... until then.