Ever since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, there has been tremendous buzz around the potential applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in a vast number of fields. Medicine, in particular, stands to benefit from advances in this technology, and some medical researchers are using AI to inform their scholarly work.
Elizabeth Park, MD, MS, is an assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Rheumatology and Clinical Immunology at the Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York. She completed a master’s degree with a focus on biostatistics, data science and bioinformatics through the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, and is now using her advanced knowledge of large language models to improve clinical research using electronic health records. The Rheumatologist sat down with Dr. Park to explore her thoughts on this subject.
The Rheumatologist (TR): Can you explain the type of clinical research you conduct and the types of research questions you seek to answer?
Dr. Park: First of all, thank you for interviewing me. This area isn’t new in medicine, but I still think it’s a bit new for rheumatology. Hopefully, articles like this can inspire or trigger some interesting collaborations and conversations.
Dr. Park
I use electronic health record (EHR) data to build clinical cohorts and generate evidence, including studying important clinical outcomes and associations. I extract information from EHR data at my local institutions, like New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center (NYP/CUIMC), as well as [from] an international network of EHRs and claims databases called the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI), which was founded at Columbia University. One example of a clinical association I am currently studying is between methotrexate (and other disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs) and interstitial lung disease in rheumatoid arthritis (RA-ILD). I am using NYP/CUIMC and Cornell EHR data and extending this to OHDSI, which contains over 200 million unique patient records. Hopefully this can generate a solid amount of evidence and strengthen prior studies that indicated no strong associations between methotrexate and RA-ILD. This would finally relieve all of us rheumatologists and pulmonologists from this long-standing concern.
TR: How did you become interested in data science and bioinformatics?
Dr. Park: I think it came from my somewhat nerdy inclination and interest in manipulating large volumes of data. Studying patterns within the data and brainstorming efficient ways of data extraction, processing and synthesis were already among some of my interests, and this naturally led to my focus on using data science and informatics methods.
