“I know what I DON’T want to do when I grow up!” That’s what our oldest son, Alec, told us when he was 14, and he spent the next 10 years staying as far away from our fields as possible by getting a degree in piano performance and then starting a master’s degree in collaborative piano. We encouraged him to do a double major or at least get a minor in mathematics, but he was completely dedicated to music. Halfway through his master’s, while playing piano for the rehearsals of the opera Carmen in Pittsburgh, he decided the life of a musician wasn’t for him. He got an MS in biomedical informatics in Utah and is now working for the Veteran’s Health Administration doing natural language processing and getting a PhD in population health sciences with a focus on biostatistics. I tell you this story, because he told me this week that the more he learns, the more he feels like a novice. I told him to get used to that paradoxical feeling.
I feel that way often, and the feeling has been especially intense as I work on the brain cancer survivorship project, trying to design a meaningful and feasible evaluation. A group of us have spent many hours hashing this out, and my lack of knowledge and experience in what you might think is a core informatics area--evaluation--is glaring and humbling. Yes, I’ve taken classes in study design and biostatistics. Sure, I’ve read many papers and guides on evaluation, including the WHO guide on digital health interventions. And, of course, I’ve led and published on evaluations of natural language processing and machine learning systems. But what’s obvious to me is the narrowness of my research expertise in the complex, multidisciplinary world we are trying to transform and the gaping holes in my knowledge and probably in that of any one of us (hopefully it’s not just me!). It reminds me of a seminar talk by Polina Kukhareva about creating an evaluation framework for SMART on FHIR apps. I liked this figure that gets down to the types of questions we need to ask of different experts:
Creating an evaluation framework for the Validitron will rely on a plethora of questions from different angles and will need to synthesize frameworks from varying fields. So I’m trying not to be too hard on my self as we go down this journey and our clinical partners wait for progress. The truth of the paradox reveals itself to me regularly: the more you learn, the more you feel like a novice.
I learned something fun this weekend: The Great Ocean Road and Twelve Apostles are as beautiful as I thought they’d be. Brian is in the US (just landed after a tortuous trip), and I braved the weekend trip on my own with three huskies (we still have our foster dog).
RLQ #14. You have the twelve apostles--we have "come to Jesus (moments/meetings)". This is something we say often in professional settings where the hope for the meeting is that the participants undergo a difficult but positive and powerful realization or change in character or behavior. I think many of you haven't heard this before, so I was excited to share it this week!
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