Internship

About my Internship

My internship's goal is to understand public opinion surrounding multiple topics and ethical questions within Palliative care. One attention-grabbing fact about my work is that we're asking the public about their opinion about the ethical use of AI in healthcare which is a very relevant topic not just in healthcare, but in the workforce as a whole. This work matters because it is important for healthcare professionals to understand how the public feels about healthcare, especially palliative care as chronic conditions are becoming more prevalent, especially within the older population and those who need help navigating their end of life care.

AI Project

The AI Project is a quantitative project that was halfway in the research process when I started my internship. This project sought to understand how the public felt about the use of AI in their end of life care. I was tasked with data collection, and this was done by sharing a digital survey for the general public to answer. This project is unfinished, however it gave me an incredible opportunity to participant and contribute to the internship's research tasks.

The visuals shown below discuss the significance of this topic and why my internship's research matters!

7 Most Crucial Use Cases of Generative AI in Healthcare. [Photograph]. NextGenINVENT. https://nextgeninvent.com/blogs/use-cases-of-generative-ai-in-healthcare/

This first image shows the important uses that Generative AI can have in healthcare. As AI is being implemented into the field, my internship is working to understand the patient perspective of AI which is important as AI poses risks to their privacy and safety.

VJOncology. (2024). Artificial Intelligence Approaches To Palliative and Supportive Care. Video. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTADC6_LbrI

This video directly touches upon the topic and explains how the spread of AI is an important discussion to be had. My internship's work is meaningful and this video explains the aspects of it.

Chua, Ritchie, & Bates. (Dec 2022). Enhancing serious illness communication using artificial intelligence. [Photograph]. ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Human-versus-hybrid-artificial-intelligence-AI-human-workflow-for-serious-illness_fig1_358156327

The second image shows the possibilities that AI can have the workflow of healthcare and what certain areas can be directly improved upon. It shows the meaningful of my internship's work as our ultimate goal is to understand people's opinion on AI so that AI implementation is a much easier process for both patient and provider.

Internship Artifact
ALS Project Summary

Palliative care is a specialized form of care that seeks to relieve suffering and improve the quality of life of those with chronic and/or serious illnesses. The work I did for my internship focused on palliative care and ethical questions surrounding it. At my site I had tasks that I completed by myself and other duties, with a major one being a research project that I collaborated with my peers to assist in. The research project I contributed to encompassed the barriers to advance care planning conversations. In this project I collaborated with my peers to create a codebook used it to code ALS clinic transcripts. In my showcase I will go into further detail about the codebook, the methods my peers and I used in this project, and the findings of our research.

LHSI: ALS Presentation

Workplace

My Role as a Team Member

This year I've I believe I've been a communicative team member who seeks to have clear and consistent communicative with my peers. In meetings I make sure I talk clearly and understand what my tasks are. When working with others I make sure I talk about my own work and ideas clearly. At first my team role was more isolated as my tasks were mainly done by myself, with the exception of a few, however that changed later on when we took on a transcript coding project which involved working together.

My Contributions

My contributions helped my internship team proceed with discussing coding work on clinical transcripts for a project, help further insight and development on a codebook, and to help further the team's goal of distributing an online survey to people. My efforts mattered because I was able to fulfill the tasks that were assigned to me by my supervisor, of which my time and effort alongside others contributed to my internship's various work such as the ALS transcript coding project.

Successes and Challenges

I felt successful as an intern when I actively contributed to a project alongside my peers. I actively participated in discussions with my coworkers, maintained a flexible schedule and actively attended weekly meetings, and spent the needed time to the proper time to complete my personal work. Another time I felt successful as an intern is when I fully completed a last minute task on time. I completed the task by splitting it up into 2 sections to work on at different times and when I was confused I reached out to my supervisor to get a better understanding of how to complete the task. These successes taught me that by managing my time, I can allocate the appropriate time for my internship work so that I can be successful not just in my internship work, but in my future academic and career goals as well.

One major challenge I faced in my internship was being unable to keep track of my work and knowing how to do certain tasks. An example of this issue was during a meeting where I was to find research articles and record my findings into a shared document, however I was a bit preoccupied with something and couldn't give the meeting my full attention which led to my poor understanding of the task and the inability to complete it properly. To solve this issue, I contacted my supervisor and asked for more clarification regarding what exactly I needed to so and after she showed me an example of what I would be doing, I have a much better understanding of what is expected of me and have been able to work on the research task.

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