This summer, I am working at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, as a research intern at the F. Widjaja Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) Research Institute. I will primarily focus on studying a multidisciplinary prehabilitation (prehab) program for IBD surgery patients. The main goal of the prehab program is to reduce surgical complications for patients. The rationale behind the program is that by preparing the body and mind for surgery through meetings starting four weeks before surgery with a physical therapist, dietitian, nurse practitioner, and social worker and continuing those visits for four weeks after discharge, this goal can be achieved. My role will include data processing and analysis, chart reviews, data entry, patient outreach, and patient enrollment.
Over the summer, I have two main goals. The first is to begin analyzing smartwatch device information from each patient to see if we can draw conclusions. I hope to write code that will merge the application where the smartwatch data is collected with the other data application we use to store patient data. Hopefully, after successful analysis, I will be able to see trends and draw conclusions from the data collected so far. Additionally, the program I create will be used in future studies as the project grows. My second goal this summer is to further my research from last summer, where I performed a retrospective chart review of the prehabilitation program. I
hope to add patients to the study, perform additional tests, and begin writing a paper on my findings. This will provide a more comprehensive understanding of the program’s effectiveness and contribute valuable insights to the field.
