Swetha Uses MSIS Degree to Improve Healthcare System
Prior to starting Northwestern’s Master's in Information Systems (MSIS) program, Swetha Popuri, ’22 was particularly influenced by a TED Talk a health policy professor showed her when she was an undergraduate student. “I remember the presenter saying, ‘The number one killer in women is a heart attack. Do you know why? It's because as a mother, wife, and caretaker of the family, she must push any form of pain aside to help her family, and in the process, she forgets to take care of herself.’”
Something about that statement stuck with her. “We are just taught 'Be healthy, eat healthy, and exercise,' but that's it. No one knows specifically about what a woman goes through.” When a relative's cardiac emergency shook her family, Swetha realized she wanted to go deeper to help women learn more about their health.
Then Swetha, who grew up outside Seattle with parents who worked in tech, had an idea. She thought, “What if I can create a tool that could help doctors easily detect cardiac issues in women? If it can detect a small change in the body or heart muscle, it could help with early diagnosis.” She began to research ways she could create such a tool. “Then I came across AI and its uses in the healthcare field. I felt like, ‘This is it. This is the field I was destined to be in.’"
She got serious about learning AI and began acquiring certifications in the field, which is how she learned about Northwestern's MSIS program. “What I liked about it was that I could specialize in not just AI but also have access to many other courses related to different specializations. I'm a huge fan of AI and data science, which are important for the healthcare industry,” she says. “I was excited that I could do courses related to both of those.”
Northwestern's hands-on information systems courses
In the program, Swetha got hands-on experience on how to interpret data in the healthcare realm. “My professor Sunil Kakade gave us some real-world data sets, for example, breast cancer data. I had to take that data set and use an algorithm to figure out how many people get a diagnosis of benign tumors vs. malignant tumors: How many of these are true results? How many are getting false positives? And then, how many are getting false negatives? How many are getting true negatives of this diagnosis?"
Kakade’s course on machine learning was influential in other ways as well. During a conversation about her professional goals working in the AI and machine learning aspects of healthcare, he told her about an opening for an administrative fellow in the IT and design track at Common Spirit Health, where he works. He told her, “’My company has this opportunity and I think you should try this out.’” She applied, got in, and began her fellowship after graduation.
Swetha believes the skills she learned in Melanie Meyer’s course on integration, interoperability and standards will also help prepare her for her fellowship, providing her with deeper knowledge of healthcare IT tools like electronic medical records. “We learned what goes into creating these tools and what elements are needed like architecture, health terminology, and more.”
For the course, Swetha created a project around Cross Platform Interoperability Health Records which would allow electronic health and medical records from different companies to sync with each other so that a hospital can have all the data possible related to the patient without having the patient fill out multiple forms. “The knowledge I gained from the hands-on work I needed to do in this course, including coming up with my own tool to develop, gives me a better understanding of the healthcare tools that are being used in today's healthcare system. Plus, this gives birth to creativity which is what fuels the world and the healthcare system,” she says.
The accidental coder
One of the biggest realizations Swetha made through the program was that, to her surprise, she is a coder. “My parents, who both are in IT, would say, ‘You should be an engineer—you should know coding.’” She assumed it was too difficult and avoided it, but as she progressed in her program, she says, “I started to gain more confidence in myself, and I truly started to enjoy coding. I realized that I'm actually pretty good at it because it's all logic and analysis related.”
In her free time, Swetha enjoys learning Kathak, one of the eight primary classical forms of Indian dance, which utilizes footwork, hand movements, and facial expressions as storytelling tools. Is there a connection between stringing together commands in coding and dancing? She thinks so. “Your brain is essentially a machine. We teach it that this is how you move this arm, then it will teach the rest of the neurons within their system to move that arm. Same thing with dance, same thing with music. Your brain is teachable because it's a machine.”
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