Three faculty talks made for an exciting late-morning segment at our 2022 event. Below, view full versions and excerpts of talks by Yong Chen, PhD; Joost Wagenaar, PhD; and Meghan Lane-Fall, MD, MSHP, FCCM.
 

With the increasing availability of electronic health records (EHR) data, it is important to effectively integrate evidence from multiple data sources to enable reproducible scientific discovery. However, we are still facing practical challenges in data integration, such as protection of data privacy, the high dimensionality of features, and heterogeneity across different datasets, Dr. Chen told our audience. In this full talk, Dr. Chen describes the solution he and colleagues created.

 

In this excerpt, Dr. Chen describes one study, on pregnancy outcomes and fetal loss, to illustrate the challenges of data integration and a viable solution.

 

Scientific progress increasingly requires comprehensive data integration, so we need to invest in developing resources to facilitate this, Dr. Wagenaar told our audience. In this full talk, he describes the improvements we need in order to collaborate on data and publish it in a meaningful way, and the platform he and colleagues have developed to tackle these challenges.

 

How do we mediate between the world where data are generated and those where they will be used? The needs—and the solutions—go far beyond a simple repository, Dr. Wagenaar says in this excerpt, and he offers an example.

 

Aiming to improve patient care, Dr. Lane-Fall specializes in implementation science, examining how medicine looks in practice. To get the most complete answers, we need qualitative as well as quantitative measures, she says — but mixed methods pose special challenges, as she illustrates in this full talk.

 

Dr. Lane-Fall discusses why qualitative (“qual”) and quantitative (“quan”) approaches  are complementary: to determine exactly what the data show, and why. In this excerpt, she illustrates via one particular case.