Richard Cameron and colleagues receive $1.5 Million NIH Grant
Richard Cameron, Professor and Head of the School’s Department of Linguistics, is one of the UIC researchers who, under the leadership of Barbara Di Eugenio (UIC, Computer Science), were able to secure a grant from the National Institutes of Health in the total amount of $1,495,213.00.
The NIH grant funding will be spread out over a four-year span. The project aims to develop computer-refined and computer-generated discharge notes for heart patients as they leave the hospital. Discharge notes are intended to identify to the patient what has happened to them and how they may take care of themselves upon leaving the hospital. The input to these notes will come from the attending physicians, nurses in the cardiac unit, and the patients themselves. Richard and his colleagues aim to make the discharge notes more patient-centric.
Richard’s role in the project has been (and will continue to be) that of interviewing heart patients in the hospital so as to identify topics, concerns, and narrative structures that may recur as the patients recount their experiences. As of now, Richard has worked with 30 patients in the hospital, and interviews with 27 of them were recorded. Together with Carolyn Dickens, who helps identify patients, Richard plans on interviewing more patients, transcribing more interviews, and conducting close narrative analyses of the assembled materials.
The work supported by the grant will take place under the principal investigatorship of Barbara Di Eugenio (Computer Science) and will include participants from various departments in the UIC School of Medicine and beyond, among them Andrew Boyd, Debaleema Chattopadhyay, Karen Dunn Lopez, Pamela Martyn-Nemeth, Amer Ardati, Carolyn Dickens, and our very own Richard Cameron.