Mad Minute with Jon Motyka

You recently joined MCIRCC’s Data Science Unit. What about the available opportunity most excited you?
I was most excited about the team aspect of this opportunity.  Coming from a role in which I was more of an individual contributor rather than a team member, the ability to learn from peers and receive constructive feedback is something I very much value in terms of professional growth.  Aside from that a more personal goal of mine has always been to not only assist in research, but to create tools from it that are used to improve healthcare related outcomes – which happens to be the primary objective of the Data Science Unit at MCIRCC!

Describe your role as a Data Engineer within the Data Science Unit.
The main focus of my role is on the automation of data acquisition and processing so that the data can be used for upstream processes such as machine learning model training.  I’ll also assist in decisions related to the machine learning models that we want to use, as well as implement those models into the automation process for future projects.

What goals in your new position do you hope to accomplish in 2020? 
I’m hoping to complete a data pipeline that will pull electronic health records from Epic’s Clarity database.  The data will be gathered on an automatic and continuous basis and feed directly into our PICTURE (Predicting Intensive Care Transfers and other Unforeseen Events) platform to be included in model training and testing.  The goal of this pipeline is to ensure that the quality of data that we are using for our models is consistent and set to a high standard.  Completion of this pipeline should also allow for our team to focus more on analytics and less on the arduous task of data cleaning.  

Help us get to know you a little better. Please share some of your hobbies, interests, something interesting or unique about you, etc.
I try to maintain an active lifestyle filled with athletics and outdoor activities.  I spend the cold seasons playing basketball and ice fishing, while the warm seasons are reserved for golf, camping, and more fishing.  I’ve found myself drawn to all aspects of computer science and am pursuing a part-time master’s degree in it.   Aside from that, my wife Erica and I have two dogs (no kids yet) that we love to take out on adventures!