Staff Spotlight: Ayushi Gupta
Background
Ayushi is originally from India where she studied dentistry and received her MBA in Health and Hospital Administration. She worked as a dentist for a year before moving to emergency management and clinical administration.
She then moved to the US and pursued her interest in healthcare IT, completing a Master’s degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) in Biomedical and Health Informatics while working as a research assistant in the UNC School of Dentistry.
She began in her role as a Research Consultant in the Department of Medicine three years ago, where she enjoys the great culture, work environment and flexibility the UW offers.
“The Department of Medicine gives me the opportunity to grow my knowledge and supports in professional development,” she said.
“I work with people who are champions in their field, and I get to learn a lot about clinical and operational aspects of different specialties in medicine."
Supporting research
As DOM Research Consultant, Ayushi consults for providers, clinical informaticists, epidemiologists, data scientists and engineers to abstract and integrate electronic health record (EHR) data in support of Research and QI studies. She develops ad hoc reports and extracts, validates, organizes, and presents EHR data to uncover clinical trends. This data helps to inform strategies for leading quality improvement initiatives and clinical decision making.
“With every new project, I am exposed to new capabilities and strengths of healthcare data. I am glad that I can make an impact towards improving patient care,” she said.
Ayushi is also a member of the AID/DOM Research Collaboratory (ARC). As an analyst working under Dr. Nina Kim, professor (Allergy & Infectious Diseases), she assists AID and DOM members with data access and analysis. ARC's mission is to "create a learning health system, where generating knowledge becomes a natural outgrowth of patient care."
Data at Work
Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, as symptoms of infection and impact of comorbidities were unclear, Ayushi worked closely with frontline healthcare workers to compile data from Covid patients seen at UW Medicine. She collected data on symptoms, documented comorbidities and treatments to understand the profile of illness for different populations. This type of data has been vital for healthcare teams in understanding population risk and gaining a better idea of prognosis and treatment modalities for future patients.
NLP
Natural Language Processing is the artificial intelligence-driven process of making human input language decipherable to software. This process helps illuminate trends in a dataset from written documentation.
Ayushi was also excited to work on a recent project identifying endocarditis patients using data from free text entries in electronic health records.
“Instead of using less reliable ICD code methodology,” she said, “I used Discharge Summary text data to identify the endocarditis patients, and pulled characteristics like the microorganisms causing the disease and the valves affected by their condition using Natural Language Processing methodology.”
Ayushi also rounded out her skillsets by recently gaining EPIC Cogito, EPIC Clarity, EPIC Caboodle and EPIC Clinical Data model professional certifications.
Outside work
Ayushi and her husband got married in India and moved to the US in 2016. She enjoys spending time with her kids, a 4 year old daughter and a son who just turned one, and travelling.
“We have travelled to 26 states in US so far and plan to visit all 50 at least once.”
She also has a hidden talent – reading people’s minds!