My name is Jake Roden-Foreman, and I am a trauma researcher at a large, urban trauma center in North Texas.1 I’ve been working in trauma research since 2015, and I’ve always been impressed by the remarkable work that trauma centers do. After working in and with trauma centers for a while, I’ve really been amazed by two things in particular:
- Trauma centers generate sooooo much data—both in the EHR and especially in their trauma registries
- The people tasked with using these data to improve patient care have little to no training in (a) the tools and methods needed to analyze the data they create and (b) how to properly interpret any such analyses
To be clear, I’m not criticizing anyone here. Trauma centers are staffed by some of the most highly trained and dedicated clinicians, registrars, and administrators out there. It’s just that trauma centers are almost universally missing something that most businesses have these days: data analysts.
Thankfully, I’m rather tech-savvy and a massive data nerd, so I’ve been able to help my colleagues with a lot of things, like setting up complex formulas or conditional formatting in Excel, making new custom fields in TraumaBase, creating automated report cards for attendings, and developing tools to help with data cleaning.
Some of the challenges my colleagues and I faced have even resulted in journal publications. In fact, if you’ve ever heard of me before, it’s probably because I created the Need For Trauma Intervention and the Standardized Triage Assessment Tool. Through my research, I hope to create many more things that can help improve trauma care.
However, I’ve come to the realization that there is only so much I can do to help within the traditional, academic publishing framework. I hope this website will help to fill the gap between the information I want to share and the knowledge that is “worthy” of being published in a journal article.
To that end, everything on this blog will be free and open-source (with very few if any exceptions).2 That means that if you want to see how I did some piece of data-wizardry, you can go to the GitHub repository for this site and see the code for yourself. Most of the content on this site will be about where trauma and data overlap. Sometimes it’s just going to be one or the other…and there will probably be one or two posts where I’m just screaming into the void.
Although I’ll be careful and try to be helpful, I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to help you—or even that I’ll be right all the time. But I promise this much: if I’m wrong about something I post to this site, I’ll admit it and I’ll correct it. After all, I’m here to help.
Legal: Unless otherwise stated, the text, media, and other contents of this website are published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. Unless otherwise stated, the source code and any software published on this website are published under GNU General Public License v3.0.