Effective Technology for Healthcare and Public Health 9 views

In a realm where efficiency and efficacy can make the difference between life and death, I wanted to better understand how I could use my engineering skills for the better. I sought to study the full scope of technology in healthcare applications through my technical project and STS research. My technical project allowed me to get hands-on experience with engineering a data ingestion application for a public health agency, and my STS research was a case study regarding the necessity of community engagement and user understanding in order to make technology useful beyond its purely technical features. The projects complemented each other by emphasizing the value of both technical skills and actual implementation, and I gained a better understanding of how to effectively engineer for the users I aim to help. For the technical portion of my thesis, I had the opportunity to work directly with a public health agency in order to develop a data quality application for them. The users had previously had problems with submitting and validating critical data in one centralized process, and they frequently ran into data quality problems and difficulty addressing them. The application I engineered allows users to upload to relevant databases and clean data within them. I utilized Palantir Foundry and its suite of subapplications to perform automatic data quality checks on uploaded data, enable in-platform user editing, and promote customer ownership. In the future, a user-friendly application that enables data quality control such as this one could continue to be re-applied in a wide variety of contexts. For the research portion of my thesis, I sought to better understand how to effectively deploy technology used for healthcare in a way that balances increased efficiency with accessibility to improve the experiences of both patients and doctors. I used MyChart as a case study, which is an example of a patient portal technology that allows patients to digitally access their data and communicate with their healthcare providers. Based on my research and Peter-Paul Verbeek’s theory of technological mediation, I argued that MyChart is an example of technology that may be technically proficient, but it is ineffective in fulfilling its purpose because it is not accessible to target users. Because many users, especially those of historically marginalized demographics, cannot understand or effectively leverage this technology which facilitates their relationships with their healthcare providers, their trust in the technology and the healthcare system as a whole is reduced. Having a better idea of how technology can fall short beyond the engineering design process can enable engineers, managers, and policymakers to more equitably and effectively deploy such technology. I was reminded that engineering alone does not make effective technology: it is a matter of whether the intended users are able to use it for its intended purpose. Technology has the potential to streamline and improve many critical areas of life, including healthcare, but ignoring the flaws of implementation could potentially lead to exacerbated inequalities or failed product launches that worsen existing problems and reduce trust in engineers. Through my thesis, I have learned how engineering extends far beyond the desk and computer at which I write code.

BS (Bachelor of Science)

MyChart; database application; healthcare technology; public health

English

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2026-05-08