Bo Fuld, Manager of Software Engineering in Research Informatics (and Cornell alum!), leads an engineering team that builds the infrastructure pipelines necessary to deliver patient data from EHRs to the various data repositories that medical researchers rely on. Her group has become even more critical during the COVID pandemic. With crucial data infrastructure already in place, they were in a unique position to deliver new data pipelines dedicated to COVID data and research. We had the pleasure of speaking with Bo about her projects and her team, and how they've adjusted to work during lockdown.
How many years have you been with ITS? WCM?
I started in ITS in 2012, so this will be the ninth year I’ve been with the institution. My nine year anniversary will be August 27th.
And what was your role when you first joined ITS?
I was a senior SharePoint developer. Then I was promoted to Document Management and Services Architect, and then three years and four months ago I joined the Research Informatics Team, and now my role is Manager of Software Engineering in the Research Informatics Group.
And what do you do on a day-to-day basis?
My job is to lead the engineering team, and to integrate data from multiple different source systems, and create and build ETL pipelines, and then deliver the data to researchers to do science. We build and support i2b2, OMOP, research data repositories, biobank service, NLP service, AoU, SUPER REDCap etc.
What are some examples of the projects or initiatives you work on generally to promote IT for Weill Cornell?
As a team we work on so many projects and move very fast. We have the OMOP service – which is a common data model. We transform our EHR data from various EHR systems to this common data model so researchers can query on top of this model instead of going to multiple source systems to gather the data. Also, this is a common data model used by many institutions across the globe, which may use EHR systems different than ours. This way we can do data sharing across multiple sites, which is very important because demographics and patient population can be so different. With OMOP they get all these pieces of EHR data in a common format to do their research.
We deliver data for data sharing across multiple platforms. For example, INSIGHT, NIH NCATS ACT network, and alsoN3C (National COVID Cohort Collaborative). For COVID, we deliver data on a bi-weekly basis, and a weekly basis.
I want to talk about projects you've worked on since the pandemic started, because it sounds like your work has shifted a lot. What are some of the COVID projects you’re working on now?
Yes, absolutely. It’s an ongoing initiative, but last March we switched our focus to COVID support. And while we still have to keep the lights on for other services, our group Research Informatics is actually in a very unique position to provide support during the pandemic, because we already did all the work before the pandemic. We had infrastructure ready, we had pipelines ready, and we have expertise in the source system, we have expertise to build the pipelines and deliver data. So, we were able to turn around very quickly and build the new COVID data pipelines. That’s COVID IDR, COVID OMOP, and we also have COVID related elements integrated to i2b2 and ACT. So after we build these data pipelines we provide this data to the research community at WCM, and we share the data across institutions, to Insight and NCATS. Lots of COVID data we refresh and send on a weekly basis or every other week, so it’s very demanding – you know, something always goes wrong (laughs), but we try very hard to keep our release schedule and make sure the new data will be pushed out.
Typically, researchers are doing retrospective research. But when COVID hit the release cycle got much, much faster. We had to modify our data ingestion because we have to get data more quickly. We do a daily incremental to get more up-to-date data, and then we build pipelines just to focus on COVID data.
It’s fascinating you had this pipeline set up and ready to go.
Yea, like the COVID IDR, we turned it around in seven days. But also my team has been working many late hours and weekends, it’s a burnout.
Yes, well that brings me to another question – what has your experience been like this past year as we went fully remote and transitioned to pandemic living and pandemic working, and what are you doing to cope and adjust in your work life?
Well, it’s a very unusual year for everyone, right? It’s difficult for everyone. So on top of adjusting to pandemic living at home, the remote work brings up a lot of challenges, because our team size is not small. I have 10 engineers on our team, and there are different engineers responsible for different areas. So, to ensure we still work efficiently at a team to push out the things that we need to, I set up plenty of ad hoc calls with team members – because really we need to push it out every week with refreshed data, bug fixes and enhanced features, and sometimes you know the server is just slow. So, we put in a lot of hours outside of regular meetings so that we can brainstorm together and troubleshoot and work alongside each other, just like what we would do at a regular office. You know in the office you come to the conference room or stop by someone’s desk and do it together. But we can’t do that anymore, so we have lots of ad hoc calls – over the weekend, at night.
I’m very proud of my team, everyone has really risen to the occasion to be available as much as possible. But this remote work feels very isolated. We used to stop by each other’s desk to say hello, find out what happened on the subway. We miss those social aspects. So, to make up for that I plan team happy hours on Zoom once in a while so we have time to be together – no work is the only rule! We just chat and catch up, or play a game together, just unwind. It’s so important to feel support from each other during a time like this, and still feel like we’re part of a team. And on top of that, because of the amount of work we’ve had we’ve actually hired some new members to join the team. So we learned how to onboard virtually!
I have a lot of respect for people who have started new jobs during this pandemic! It seems very difficult.
Yeah, and our field is very specialized, you can’t really just Google to find an answer to something. I set up a series of Zoom calls and record the training, then share it with the new team members, and we bring everyone together based on the topic and record and share that too, so they have a reference. And we also took a chance to increase onboarding materials. I think we did pretty well, I’m really happy with the new team members and their performance.
It’s been a very busy year at work. I keep reminding my team members that self-care is so critical so we can thrive in the long run. We encourage our team members to take time off.
Are you taking time off?
Well, it’s still really, really hard, with all this delivery. I used to practice yoga – we have a community place in my neighborhood. I was there 10 years! I became personal friends with the people there, we’d go out for coffee after yoga. I used to do it twice a week, now it’s online, so lots of people have dropped off, but I keep my schedule. Now I don’t have to commute so I do it three times a week! And on the weekends I go out to walk in Forest Park, there are so many birds, it’s a very pretty place
What did you do before you joined ITS? What drew you here?
I was working in a management consulting firm close by. Healthcare has always intrigued me – knowing you’re indirectly saving people’s lives is great. And on top of that I graduated from Cornell, and I fully enjoyed that experience, and I really loved the community. It’s great to be back. I did my undergrad in China, and came to the US to do my graduate work at Cornell in Computer Science. It was very hard at the beginning because I didn’t understand English! I would have a whole class and I wouldn’t understand a word! But the professors and my peers were so supportive. It was just an amazing experience. At the end of it I was like, oh I could stay here for another four years!
What is your favorite part about your job?
Oh there’s a lot. I know I’m spending the majority of my waking hours contributing to saving people’s lives. And even though we’re doing IT, we’re doing data, we’re helping the institution, helping research, helping people. Also, Research Informatics is a new field, and there is always so much to learn and do. I’ve never had a dull moment at work. I’m very lucky, I have a great team, and great boss, Tom Campion. They trust me, they support me. I can’t ask for more.
And I really appreciate ITS and institutional leadership during this crisis – from Dr. Cole’s Fireside Chats to Dean Choi’s COVID updates. I think they are doing everything they can to bring everybody together.
And in the spirit of Women’s History Month: who are some women you admire and why?
I grew up in a very big family, and there are incredible women in my family. I admire them a great deal. The woman I admire the most is my Grandma. I lived with her before school and she was taking care of me. Her strength, and resilience, and love of life, always inspire me. She passed away about 2 years ago but she always inspires me. Outside the family, Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Sheryl Sandburg, Indra Nooyi – she’s the CEO of Pepsi. She came from India and also did undergrad in India and came as an immigrant, and she stayed in Pepsi as the CEO for 12 years. She was the first female CEO at Pepsi, and the longest CEO at Pepsi. There are so many more, that’s just to name a few.