Zeyana Hamid, Ph.D., a Health Informatics lecturer with the Luddy School, has turned a conversation about hiring an intern into a program that’s allowing dozens of students to obtain internships or practicum credit, as they manage data to help public health agencies make the most effective decisions.
Health Informatics students at Indiana University’s Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering in Indianapolis are gaining hands-on experience by working with a Missouri social services partnership, which now plans to establish a presence in Indianapolis. (Hamid, above, is pictured mentoring students on the project, which began this summer and runs through the fall semester.)
The Master of Science degree in Health Informatics from Luddy Indianapolis enables students to assist in using data and new technologies to serve more patients more effectively.
Family-focused services under one umbrella
“The Randolph County Caring Community Partnership (RCCCP) provides coordinated service delivery through Family Support Team Meetings,” Hamid says, offering access to many types of assistance for Missouri families, from mental health services and Health Insurance Marketplace assistance to summer food aid and wellness and parenting programs.
“This family-driven process offers a multi-agency approach to helping families become healthy and self-reliant,” she adds, “as organizations work together to serve community wellness.”
Hamid became familiar with the partnership’s work while earning her master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Missouri.
The Randolph County partnership’s “one-stop shop” approach streamlines the process for families who need help.
The various agencies generate large amounts of potentially useful data. And that’s where the Luddy School’s Health Informatics students are playing a vital role.
“The data is in discrete locations depending on specific funded projects, and sometimes exist in different databases,” Hamid explains.
“Our students were assigned a task to unify the data repositories into a data warehouse, that can utilize statistical and machine leaning methods to analyze multiple datasets to give evidence that has never existed before.
“With the joint integrated records, dashboards were designed to support care provision and decision support,” she says. “For example, who needs which services and how the system can be utilized to automate care for each project.”
Students making a difference
Over this summer, about 40 students earning their Health Informatics degrees through the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Informatics at Luddy Indianapolis were placed in different projects.
Many focused on how to harness the power to data to benefit the people served by the Randolph County Caring Community Partnership.
“My project focused on developing and streamlining the processes of data collection, storage, and analysis,” says student Chandra Vikram (pictured with fellow student Cherry Gupta and instructor Zeyana Hamid).
“We sought to improve RCCCP’s data management” by using specialized health information management software, Vikram says.
“These tools empower RCCCP to track key performance indicators, monitor trends, and identify areas needing attention, ultimately supporting strategic and data-driven resource allocation,” he explains.
“Through this integration, RCCCP can make more informed and impactful decisions, directly benefiting the community by improving service delivery.”
Student Mohammad Sameer developed a machine learning-enabled decision support dashboard for public health informatics for the partnership.
“The dashboard offers predictive insights into community health trends by combining machine learning models with live data visualization,” he says, “enabling the RCCCP to allocate resources better and improve patient outcomes.”
As an instructor, Hamid is proud of the students’ work.
“Our students’ work has been the first of its kind to open a laboratory of Community Informatics Solutions for Population Health in RCCCP,” Hamid says. “We hope to brand this internship program to keep producing more innovations and embed our use-cases even to the classroom teaching.”
The power to data to improve community health
After graduating from the University of Missouri, Hamid worked with RCCCP as an Innovative Strategies Director. “I learned a lot about the demand for informatics that community organizations have,” she says.
In her job, Hamid worked with interns from the University of Missouri in public health informatics. When she left the organization to join academia at Luddy Indianapolis, Hamid remained aware of the overarching need to connect more students to such opportunities–specifically, her students at the Luddy School.
“I reached out to RCCCP in my first year and with confidence connected a recent graduate who was my TA to be considered for hiring. Mounika Gottipatti has proved to be a competent dedicated informatics specialist and trainer of different programs that are run in the organizations,” Hamid says.
“My current TA Cherry Gupta is the team leader for packaging, marketing, and training.
“With her performance, I was more determined to extend my request to have our other students conduct their internships to showcase their skills and learn from practical application of informatics at community level.”
Tapping into career-focused skills
Hamid says the work her students are doing with the public health agencies’ data is not only important but is providing them with valuable job-focused experience.
“Students got exposed to community health programs, information needs, and systems demand and supply,” she notes.
“With the training received they could design solutions and face new challenges that will shape their innovation and transformation in the advanced classes that will enhance competency in their careers.
“Students will appreciate the community demand of their professions and will have a wider perspective of new innovations and how they can craft their proposed solutions.”
Looking to Indiana next
While this data management project has been focused on the central Missouri-based partnership, Hamid says the hope is to take what they’ve learned and use it to work with other agencies.
“Thirty students have been placed in projects based in Missouri,” Hamid says. “Ten students got paid positions depending on their specific projects funding, and the remaining were using the existing projects for learning purposes.
“RCCCP is intending to create a physical presence in Indianapolis to extend its informatics innovation. In this work we assigned another 10 students to create a resource mapping of Indianapolis community health organizations to assess the ecosystem and informatics capacities for our local organizations.”
Hamid notes, “This is the first time we have tried the program.
“I’m hoping we will extend our projects and accomplishments to other similar organizations in Indiana, and in other states with the right marketing support.
“Our ultimate intention to start in RCCCP was to get informatics products that we can showcase in Indiana to get to work with similar organizations that are doing similar work and do need our expertise to collaborate in organization-wide informatics capacity building.”
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