Cody Oliver I MPH 6905 I Spring 2021
Cody Oliver I MPH 6905 I Spring 2021
When I began my internship I met with Dr. Odum to discuss potential areas of research to work on. Due to my degree being in Public Health, she decided that I would assist on the NSQIP Spine study being conducted. This study dealt with population health and thus would be more fitted for my graduate program. The study set out to determine if surgical optimization among spine patients would potentially prevent complications postoperatively. This would be examined through identifying many risk factors, but most importantly albumin level. This is usually a good predictor to follow. From here I began to perform a literature review on past research to not only determine what has been carried out, but also how the research being done could expand the gap in knowledge. The literature review contained information from the years 2010 to present. Once I completed my literature review on the subject, I then was given a sample data set to practice with using SAS. It contained data that was used for a previous study conducted by the organization on NSQIP for hips. After becoming familiar with the code, I used SAS to analyze the spine data and compile the important charts and tables.
Attached in this section is the PowerPoint Poster and presentation on my time completing my internship.
The main purpose of completing an internship is not only to gain valuable experience to use throughout my career, but also to implement the skills that I've learned throughout my time in graduate school. Through utilizing my abilities I've learned in my courses, I was able to leave the agency with two products. Those two products were an annotated bibliography and data analysis produced from SAS. The annotated bibliography was developed through the summary of past literature examined, and the data analysis was produced through use of SAS code.