MD and CS

[salubrioustoxin]

I'm currently in medical school and picking up CS through online courses and personal projects. I was wondering if anyone can provide examples of how a background in CS/programming has played a part in his/her medical careers.

[noname123]

Depends on what area of health you want to focus on.

PCP/patient interaction - WhatsApp Doc, a iOS app that is based off books/resources like this: http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=13... that help patients plan their apt. with specialists/PCP ahead of time.

Pharmakinetics - More for pharmacists but apps that store drug information for different drug regimen that the patient is on and figure out if there's a bad interaction.

Health Informatics - More in hospital and clinic settings. Electronic medical records.

Personal Genomics - 23andme as a consumer startup; but data mining and analysis based on either SNP or more available in the future, whole genome sequencing for a person ($3000 and declining)

Retail Medical Devices - Tracking devices for diabetics that is linked up to their mobile devices, etc.

[geebee]

UCSF magazine recently published a series of interesting articles on this...

http://www.ucsf.edu/news/2013/11/110281/harnessing-power-pre...

I know you asked specifically for examples from people who used CS in a medical career (rather than general advice), so I do apologize for not really answering your question and giving general advice. But you might want to look into data science. Coursera had a good data science course that will probably be repeated - it didn't have anything specifically about medicine, but you would get introduced to Python in a data science context. My guess is that you'd be able to use your domain knowledge in Medicine to take this in an interesting direction.

[pmiller2]

I am not a physician, but these people are doing some interesting stuff with machine learning and graph databases in the medical field: http://www.medgle.com/

[salubrioustoxin]

Conversely, has anyone currently working in an IT position had to deal with physicians? What was the context? What skills did you wish the physician had? What made it easy or difficult to collaborate on a project?

[jyz]

When I was in high school, I had a little business running on the side to install servers to backup files for physicians. I got paid about 300-400 for about 2-3 hours of work. Though I told them it usually takes about a full day.

[dome82]

I did. It is really interesting working with them, even if they change their mind very often. However, some of them could be afraid of using new developments that you may think they could actually improve their working lives.

[bobowzki]

I'm an MD and have also done extensive software development in the health care field. You can't get in touch with me if you'd like more info albin (dot) stigo (at) gmail (dot) com.

[cordite]

You'd be someone that Epic wants. They make health care software.