week four
july 4 - july 8


Monday, July 4:

Holiday!



Tuesday, July 5:

Today I spent all day going through the notes that I had taken from the Baystate visit last week to try and put the pieces of this puzzle together.  With so many actions and confirmations and agents interleaved, it is really hard to make sense of who is doing what at what time...even with a process just as simple as filling out a form or making sure a doctor calculated something correctly.  A whole lot of crazy work going on here! 

And I looked for plane tickets to fly to Louisville, KY for my sorority's annual conference in August.  This will be the first year that we're recognized as an active chapter!  Can't wait!!!



Wednesday, July 6:

I worked on some more diagrams for the Chemotherapy process.  Things just get more and more complex with it...but it is all part of the process of capturing a process...complicated!  Anywho, I also met with Professor Clarke today to discuss the semantics of the LittleJIL language, and the ways to improve the meanings behind my diagrams.  We also talked about what's involved to get in graduate school, and she gave me a website for the rankings of schools, even though it's a little bit outdated.

I bought plane tickets for Louisville today!



Thursday, July 7:

Yesterday at the Process meeting, we discussed my progress on the Adult Outpatient Chemotherapy process, and agreed that I would give a little demo/walkthrough to the Medical Safety meeting for Friday (tomorrow) morning.  So I worked on that pretty much all day...printing and re-printing diagrams, getting advice from those more knowledgeable (Rachel and Raunak), adding more and more post-its as comments to explain my thought process.

Also, Dr. Clarke and Dr. Gao were kind enough to take Maria, Laura, and me out for lunch in Amherst.  Laura is the third DMP student here at UMass this summer, and Professor Gao is Maria's mentor.  Good food, great company--a very fun time!
 


Friday, July 8:

Today at the Medical Safety meeting, I gave my demo of the Chemo process for almost 2 hours.  I felt really bad borrowing Dr. Clarke's laptop for that long; it was almost dead on batteries on top of the fact that I had it for much longer than I had originally planned.  But the presentation went well: the medical safety team provided some great suggestions that worked for modeling other medical processes before, like the Emergency Room or Blood Transfusion processes.  I put their suggestions to good use, and made a somewhat final process to print out and take to the Baystate visit on Monday.  Yeah, it seems like all I've been doing is the Chemotherapy process...and that's pretty much what I have been doing!  But I really have a lot more work to do with it, on top of capturing the correct process from the medical staff at Baystate.  I still need to write the glossary of terms used in the diagrams, give it to the analysis group to see if there are any potential problem areas, and make sure all the semantics of the symbols I chose for steps are actually what I mean to represent.   I still have work to do for the next 6 weeks!  And a visit to Baystate on Monday means a lot of work.

Good thing the weather is heating up...I've been hating these cold New England "summer" days of 75.