Week Three:
Children’s Hospital Colorado Center for Gait Movement and Analysis

July 8, 2015

Data, data, data!  This week I do not have any cool stories from the Emergency Department to report.  Instead, you guessed it: data! I did not have any shadowing experiences set up (next week I will have more to report on this front) for week three, which gave me lots of time to work on my data entry.

Things were plugging along, I was getting through a solid 50 patients a day. I know that doesn’t sound like a whole lot. But, some patients can take as long as 15 minutes to enter because of other procedures or conditions taking place while they were being treated for their fracture. Although, there are those Easter eggs here and there that only take a minute or two. Sadly, at the end of week two my supervisor and I realized that some of the documentation I was using to determine whether or not patients had stayed overnight (we want to see if there is change in the number of  patients staying overnight for this procedure and what factors may contribute to that) was not quite correct. In fact, some of the documents I was using, that should have told us about the patient’s stay were just plain wrong! Not a problem in terms of someone’s medical history or future care, just incorrect for this kind of documentation and potentially detrimental to our study.

So, for me? This meant re-entering about 140 patient entries. Not as riveting as it sounds, I promise. But it’s all done! Thankfully I was not further into my 750+ patient entries before we caught it. It also helped that on a data re-entry day there was free Chinese food for the Orthopedics department…

While the week may not have too many cool medical stories, I did get to enjoy my three day weekend. I am staying with my cousin Sarah and her three children, ages 4, 12, and 15. We took them out to a fireworks show on Friday night.

On Saturday and Sunday I took time to be a good Colorado tourist and visited the Denver Museum of Natural History and the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo with fellow Cornellian and mocker (what we call our fellow mock trial teammates!) Kayla Boyd ’18.

I hope to have more interesting stories for you next week, but for now, data entry awaits!