ɫ��ɫ College Students Solve Big Data Health Problems with Grant from Merck & Co.

Bethlehem, Pa., January 14, 2015—ɫ��ɫ College’s educational partnership with Merck & Co. and will continue in 2015 thanks to Pete Lega ‘85, Merck’s director of emerging technology, and Ben Coleman, associate professor of computer science. The pharmaceutical company will support the “Future Talent Building for IT and Innovation” project for undergraduate students through 2015.

A $95,000 grant from Merck will support the next phase of a project completed in 2014 by ɫ��ɫ College faculty and students who created a module for OpenMRS, an open--‐source EMR system used extensively in developing countries.

During the three-phase project, Professor Coleman will oversee 3 groups of undergraduate students as they continue to develop and improve Open Medical Records System (OpenMRS), a platform that helps support the delivery of public healthcare information in developing countries, specifically around infectious diseases like HIV/AIDS and TB. Along with the continued improvement of OpenMRS, Coleman will add a second project: DOCGraph, another open source group trying to anonymous, federally-funded medical data available to the public.

The goal of the project is to provide undergraduate students with unique client-based experience so they can hone their skills and apply them to health IT problems while, ideally, fostering talent for Merck’s IT and Innovation departments. “What I love about this is it really gives the students a wide range of activities and experiences for their resumes, cover letters, and interviews,” says Coleman. “They now have context that you don’t naturally get out of the curriculum.”

It starts with ten of Coleman’s finest CS1 students, who begin solving problems in the same veins as what will be needed for OpenMRS and DOCgraph. Then, senior CAPSTONE students will design, solve, and present their final solutions to Merck. The graduating seniors will hand off their work to eight summer scholarship recipients who participate in a 10-week sprint in close collaboration with professional developers from Merck. Four to six computer science majors finish the job on a part-time basis during the fall 2015 semester.

Sound like a fine-tuned model? It is—and it has worked for Coleman time and time again for over 5 years. “It creates a natural hierarchy in the class,” he says. “By the time those original sophomores become seniors, they have the experience and trust built up with me to become team leaders in the class, providing them with some valuable management experience before they even graduate.”

There are thousands of installations of these open source models around the world, explains Coleman. But thanks to stringent privacy laws, you’re hard pressed to find “open source” and “medical data” in the same sentence in the United States. DOCGraph is hoping to change that by anonymizing federally-funded Medicare data and making it public. Merck, a pharmaceutical company, is interested in using models like these to locate areas where vaccines are not being prescribed according to recommendations and partnering with doctors who are leading the pack in prescribing new medications, but Coleman is in it for the learning experience. “These are wonderful big data problems,” he says. “Answering those questions exposes the students to all sorts of technologies that lead to jobs.”

ɫ��ɫ College is a private coeducational liberal arts college, offering undergraduate and graduate degrees, located in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Tracing its founding to 1742, ɫ��ɫ is recognized as America's sixth-oldest college and the first to educate women. The College emphasizes the deliberate integration of a broad-based liberal arts curriculum with hands-on learning experiences to prepare its 1,600 students, not just for jobs, but for successful careers. ɫ��ɫ College excels at transforming good students into highly competent graduates who are ready to enter the workplace with confidence or shine in graduate school. Visit the Web site at .