Week 3: Scrubs and Screening!

Hello everyone! For this week’s updates, I’ll first start with new experiences and things I’ve learned at the Iyer Clinic, then transition into progress on my meta-analysis. Some new things I’ve learned to do at the clinic include requisition forms, physicals, and additional patient system updates (beyond just vitals). 

The Iyer Clinic also does lab work, as it is connected to a larger medical chain group in Virginia that has two laboratories, and requisition forms are essentially orders for lab work to be done. I’ve mainly done requisitions for physical/annual appointments, which include the basics (i.e., CBC w/differential) and other, more specific labs (if needed) based on what Dr. Iyer requests. Physicals are another, more complicated thing that I have started to take on (with the help of a nurse). They are complicated since many questions regarding medication, family history, smoking/drinking habits, etc., must be asked and are more high-stakes than regular walk-ins or appointments, but they have made me more comfortable (in general) on calling up patients. On a similar note, I have also learned how to input this extra information into the system and have also learned more about filing patient documents. Overall, this week at the clinic has been extremely productive, albeit tiring. Interacting with patients, nurses, and doctors has been rewarding, and every day I learn more about healthcare, which makes me even more excited to eventually explore more of the field in the future!

For my meta-analysis and to clarify something from my last post: I’ve opted to use AI review systems more as a secondary review (potentially for later phases of screening?), partially because ASReview won’t work on my MacBook, but also because I want more control over the studies that make it through Phase 1 of screening. In terms of the actual screening process, I’ve finished phase 1 of screening (and have included a snippet below), based on my inclusion criteria: 

• Must contain enough information to calculate an effect size
• Must be published in English
• Must be publicly available
• Must examine the relationship between Schizophrenia and postpartum disorders 

I ran into a roadblock because I decided not to include any of the studies I collected from Europe PMC, as it was very disorganized and contained mostly duplicates from PubMed, and way too many studies for me to do manually. This led me to have to delete my citation collection on Zotero and redo it, which also led me to redo my literature search for documentation purposes, but all is well now! I plan on incorporating more open-source LLMs, possibly in later screening phases, as I discovered their usage from a meta-analysis YouTube video I stumbled upon. I hope they can also serve as pseudo-second readers, as interrater reliability is optimal for meta-analyses, and, since I am a one-person team, that is a limitation of my study. I hope to have more updates regarding my journey navigating Docker, Python, and LLMs for next week, so stay tuned!