This past summer was the fourth year of our annual internship programme here at Health Data Insight. Five interns from across the country joined us for 10 weeks over the summer to work on projects with healthcare data.
Read on to hear about what each of them has been working on and their favourite things about the internship programme.
Tobby visualised data
Tobby
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Tobby spent his internship creating visualisations of cancer data from Public Health’s England ‘Get Data Out’ programme. The Get Data Out programme produces open, anonymous statistics about the incidence, survival, diagnosis and treatment of different types of cancers. Tobby helped to transform the plain data tables into easy to use interactive graphics to help unlock the most important insights for a public audience. After some final adjusting, the visualisations will be available to see next year.
Andrew built an app
Andrew
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Over the summer Andrew built an application that compares how different NHS hospital trusts care for cancer patients. Different hospital trusts care for different sorts of people, and so comparing how care is given between trusts is difficult. But comparing trusts is useful to help commissioners decide how best to deliver cancer services. Andrew’s app will help trusts make these decisions and will be available to the NHS soon.
Roan automated a process
Roan Final
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Roan spent her time in Cambridge working to automate an existing process for extracting data. When external researchers apply to use data from Public Health England’s National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service (NCRAS), NCRAS analysts often spend a lot of time finding and extracting the data. Over the summer Roan built a tool to make this process quicker and easier.
Edward tested simulated data
Edward Pearce
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Edward spent his internship testing the Simulacrum data. The Simulacrum contains artificial data which imitates some of the data held securely by Public Health England’s National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service. Edward spent his time comparing simulated data outputs to real data outputs to make sure the simulated data can give accurate answers about cancer whilst also protecting patient confidentiality.
David tested a new methodology
David
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During his internship, David worked on two different methodological problems using cancer data. Firstly, David examined all the current methodologies for calculating cancer survival and tested a new method to see if it would work better for rarer cancers. Then David spent the second half of his internship modelling cancer incidence to see how it has changed over time and see if it could project incidence into the future.
Amine experimented with natural language processing
Amine spent his time in Cambridge over the summer developing his skills in natural language processing. Amine experimented with using NLP on cancer pathology reports to see if a computer algorithm can be used to analyse the free text in the reports. Using NLP could help the National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service (NCRAS) in Public Health England process cancer data faster and help to draw out insights from the data quicker.
Article written by Sophie Morris