Our early-career team members are an integral part of all the research we do! Today we are shining a spotlight on Julian Harrison, a Graduate Officer with the Rio Tinto Children's Diabetes Centre at The Kids Research Institute. He has an undergraduate degree in Software Engineering and a Master's degree in Artificial Intelligence, and has been working on our reccently launched DiabHQ Patient Portal.
Tell us a little bit about you and why you're here?
I have always had a passion for computing. I got into programming in primary school and have pursued computing as a career through my undergraduate degree in Software Engineering and then my Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence. Growing up my family has also relied quite heavily on medical care due to my brother being epileptic, and as a result I have also had an interest in medicine and trying to pay forward the help that we received. I have been privileged to be able to find myself in a career where I can combine my capabilities within computing and my passion for helping the medical field.
Why did you get into T1D research?
I started working for the department of health as a graduate officer to try and better understand the public health sector and to find where my skills could be used to make a difference. My first placement was at the Information System Performance Directorate (ISPD) at Royal Street, and so for my second placement I wanted to work on projects in a hospital setting to better understand the work happening closer to the frontlines of our medical system. As a result, I joined the Children’s Diabetes Centre data team working with the DiabHQ patient portal during the critical period as it began to be rolled out to patients. I had very little experience with diabetes beforehand, so I have been learning a lot this disease and the current state of care.
What are your current research projects you are working on?
I have been working on a few projects around the diabetes centre, most prominently around DiabHQ as we begin to expand its capabilities for both patients and clinicians.
- One of the biggest projects I’ve worked on involves collecting and presenting the usage analytics for the DiabHQ patient app to allow the app developers and clinical staff to understand how users are interacting with the app. This is being used to help develop the app by allowing us to track down which sections of the app are being used most and to help track down issues to make sure the app is functioning as well as possible. These analytics will be also able to be used by clinical staff used to be able to better understand the needs of patients such as which patient groups are accessing educational resources or making triage requests to better target services for groups of patients.
- I have also been working on creating a program to automatically generate forms such as travel letters for diabetic patients or letters of diagnosis using the information contained within DiabHQ. These forms will soon be able to be generated through a self-service portal within the app, rather than the current approach in which parents must call the diabetes centre and sort out the details over the phone with staff, taking up valuable time for both clinicians and parents alike. By adding these capabilities to the patient portal, the administrative burden on clinical staff to create these letters will be reduced, especially around holiday seasons or the start of the school year when they are commonly requested.
- The PAID and T1DAL surveys are used to assess the stress levels of patients and their parents, but the results of these surveys in their current format are quite hard to quickly evaluate for individual patients in a clinical setting. One of my projects has been to automatically process the PAID and T1DAL results into a more easily interpretable format in which the questions which were answered as “high stress” are presented alongside the overall score(s) for the patient and their family. These results will then be able to be used by clinical staff before appointments to review the stress levels of patients and understand the specific issues they are struggling with in terms of their diabetes management.
I’ve assisted with myriad other smaller tasks while here to help prototype potential other projects and capabilities for DiabHQ in the future, and am hoping that some of these technologies I’ve designed will be used to ease the administrative burden on clinical staff.
What T1D research breakthroughs would you like to see in the next 10 years?
From what I’ve been seeing of the technology around diabetes, it definitely feels like we’re sitting on a gold mine of data. With CGMs frequently recording glucose levels and hybrid closed loops becoming more commonly used, we’re beginning to see patients and their families getting better health outcomes with less daily management required. By improving upon the current HCL systems to better predict glucose spikes and dips around exercise and eating, I believe the day to day management of diabetes will continue to get easier and the resulting stress will continue to decline.
What do you like to do outside of your work?
I’ve been playing video games since around the time I started learning to read. I will often play video games online with a group of friends I’ve had since high school after work. I also enjoy playing the clarinet, which I have played for 14 years at this point. Outside of work I’m also working on a PhD at Curtin on predictive models for vaginal births after caesarean sections.