VitalSignsNB diabetes student spotlight: Meet the students exploring chronic disease diagnoses in administrative data
Author: Bailey Howland and Gavin Woodward
Posted on May 9, 2024
Category: Health , Pathways to Professions , Student Spotlights , Education
The VitalSignsNB research stream in NB-IRDT’s Pathways to Professions experiential learning program has focused on a different health-related project each summer since 2021. In 2023, VitalSignsNB expanded to host two new projects at once – one that focused on midwifery services in New Brunswick (featured in an upcoming Student Spotlight) while the other examined diabetes cases in administrative data, highlighting the benefits and potential limitations associated with using administrative data in chronic disease research.
The Diabetes project examined the degree of concordance between three different approaches used to identify diabetes cases in New Brunswick administrative data. These include flagging diabetes diagnoses using:
- The Canadian Chronic Disease Surveillance System (CCDSS)
- Hemoglobin A1c blood test results
- Records of physician billing to Medicare for Chronic Disease Management (CDM) of diabetes
As the first cohort of VitalSignsNB students to work in NB-IRDT’s secure data lab, the Diabetes research team analyzed data from 2012-2018 to examine the frequency of A1c- and CDM-identified cases missing from CCDSS records and how population prevalence estimates are impacted by supplementing CCDSS with A1c and CDM data.
A key finding was a degree of discordance between CCDSS and A1c/CDM case identification – information that is relevant to researchers studying diabetes in New Brunswick using administrative data products hosted by NB-IRDT. You can learn more about the team’s findings through their research infographic, and by subscribing to the DataNB newsletter to be notified when the full report on their findings is released.
Meet the 2023 VitalSignsNB – diabetes student team
Bailey Howland is in her fourth and final year of a Bachelor of Science in Biology at the University of New Brunswick. Post-bachelor’s degree, Bailey hopes to take a Master’s in Biology and pursue a research career in the medical or forensics field. In her spare time, Bailey enjoys reading, volunteering, travelling, coaching a local high school basketball team and spending quality time with her friends and family.
Gavin Woodward is a third-year student at Saint Thomas University majoring in psychology and minoring in philosophy. Upon graduation, he intends to apply to graduate programs in experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience with dreams of one day working in a position involving research in human cognition. In his free time, Gavin enjoys reading, going for bike rides and spending time in nature.
What is Pathways to Professions?
Each summer, NB-IRDT hosts student research teams as part of its Pathways to Professions (P2P) experiential learning program. For 13 weeks, these students work on projects relevant to New Brunswick while attending a full curriculum of professional skills workshops.
In 2023, NB-IRDT embarked on its second year of partnership with the Government of New Brunswick's Future GNB / Avenir GNB program and launched a new partnership with Ignite to host students working on government and industry research projects. Now that the 2023 program has ended, we are excited to share our students’ projects and their findings.