Computer scientists do more than just write code, you know

Faculty in Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science take pains to explain that computer science is not the same as computer programming, that computer science actually is a much broader and varied discipline than assembling computer code. One example of just how varied it can be is a research article published today in the February issue of the American Journal of Managed Care.

The research focuses on how a new type of care management can reduce the cost of treating extremely ill patients without reducing life span. The lead author is a computer scientist, Latanya Sweeney.

Sweeney, an associate professor of computer science, technology and policy, directs the Data Privacy Lab at Carnegie Mellon. It was her insight into how to preserve the privacy of patient records while analyzing how complex patients responded to different types of care management that made this new research possible.

The study, conducted with Blue Shield of California, included hundreds of patients treated over a 23-month period. The researchers needed to add new patients and update the records of existing patients during that study period, but requirements of the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, made that so difficult that some healthcare researchers suspected that this type of study was all but impossible.

HIPAA requires that records be stripped of patient names and a long list of "identifiers," which makes updating a medical data base difficult. Sweeney's solution turned out to be surprisingly simple: create a new, updated data base each month. Rather than create an initial data base and then update it each month, the researchers assembled all of their old and new patient records each month and stripped them of identifiers.

This wasn't a feat of computer programming, but an example of computational thinking.

Byron Spice