CS6440: Intro to Health Informatics

This course introduced the fundamentals of health informatics — the U.S. healthcare system, what constitutes health data and how it’s used, and modern healthcare interoperability standards. It’s a hands-on lab course built around HL7 FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), the standard used to exchange electronic health records between systems.

Parkinson Disease Progression App (Group Practicum Project)

The semester’s biggest deliverable: a multi-sprint team practicum (tracked in Jira across Sprints 2–6) building a patient-facing web app for tracking Parkinson’s disease symptoms. I worked with a Data Engineer and a Frontend Developer as the team’s Backend Developer.

Existing Parkinson’s symptom trackers make patients print or email their results to share with a doctor, and none connect directly to the patient’s medical record. Our app closes that gap: patients log in and take the PRO-PD assessment (Patient Reported Outcomes in Parkinson’s Disease), rating severity from 0–100 across 35 common symptoms. On submit, results are written to a PostgreSQL database and posted as a FHIR QuestionnaireResponse resource to a HAPI FHIR server, so the data is available in a standardized format a provider’s EHR could consume directly.

The homepage aggregates a patient’s PRO-PD history into a Quality of Life graph plotted over time, overlaid with medication, diagnosis, and encounter data pulled from the patient’s other FHIR resources — letting them see how symptoms track against treatment changes — plus a dashboard of their five most severe symptoms. For this iteration we used Synthea to generate synthetic FHIR records for a representative Parkinson’s patient rather than real patient data.

Tech stack: React.js, Flask, PostgreSQL, HAPI FHIR, deployed on Render.

FHIR / OMOP / SMART Lab Series

A progression of labs building practical FHIR competency: working directly with FHIR resource types like Patient and Observation using the HAPI FHIR Java library, mapping FHIR data into the OMOP Common Data Model used for health research, and building a SMART-on-FHIR web app that launches inside an EHR to pull and display patient dashboards.