Dear DBMI,

A foundational principle for DBMI’s summer program is “Festine Lente,” which means to “make haste slowly.” One of the best aspects of a relatively compact 10-week program is that, rapidly but with deliberate purpose, we can try out new ideas, evaluate how it went, and decide if we want to incorporate them into the program moving forward – much like the idea of continuous process improvement. This is definitely the case with the VBISP Design Challenge, which the students have been working on in small groups and presented about on July 21.

The focus of the design challenge this year was on developing short videos to explain an informatics concept to high school students, an effort helped by having some subject matter experts (i.e., high school students) available to contribute. Topics the groups focused on were: Predictive Analytics, What is an EHR? and the informatics aspects of the 21st Century Cures Act. While those of us in informatics know the huge impact of the 21st Century Cures Act, it was interesting to learn that most of our summer students had not heard of the law – highlighting the importance of talking about public policy and informatics with high school and undergraduate students. The videos the groups came up with were informative, and also fun! I actually learned a few things myself about all of these topics, and hopefully you’ll enjoy watching the videos and sharing them with others. 

How does this link back to “Festine Lente”? In 2020, when we rapidly pivoted the program to an online format, Bryan Steitz and Michelle Gomez identified a major issue: students were well supported by mentors on their individual research projects, but they didn’t have the chance to get to know each other and build connections with their peers – something we really want students to get out of the program. The VBSIP Design Challenge was our answer to help students overcome the difficulty of getting to know others when you’re not all in the same place.

Of course, the question when we returned to an in-person format in summer 2022 was: "Do we still need the Design Challenge?" We kicked off an evaluation focused on this topic last summer, which we’ll wrap up with this year’s student cohort – hopefully having enough data after this summer to decide how to proceed. Many thanks to Michelle Gomez, Alex Becker, and Leigh Anne Tang for their leadership of the design challenge process and the evaluation. Alex will be presenting a poster at the AMIA Symposium this fall on the VBISP Group Design Challenge evaluation, so expect to hear more!

This week, the VBISP and BEST-DS2 students presented their individual research projects. I hope you were able to stop in for part (or all!) of the sessions, as the students have been doing some incredible work this summer with their mentors and I know they appreciate your support. 

— Kim Unertl, PhD, MS, ACHIP, FACMI, FAMIA
Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Director of Graduate Studies, DBMI