My Internship at UPMC

Kyle Bargo
Jul 21, 2017 · 19 min read
By receiving a “Super Internship” grant at Juniata College, I was tasked with recording my experiences in a blog. This is for anyone who may be interested in learning of various opportunities that could transition to future employment, living in a city, or those that just want to follow along with my journey in Pittsburgh at UPMC!

Life. Changing. Medicine.

[ Intro | Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5 | Week 6 | Week 7 | Week 8 ]

Introduction: 06/02/17

Hello all! If you don’t know me, my name is Kyle Bargo, and I am a rising senior here at Juniata College. I’ll spare you my background and simply link to an introduction that I wrote when I first opened this account, because if you’re following along on my journey, you’ll find out soon enough!

This summer, I will be packing my bags and leaving the small town of Reedsville (bonus points if you know where that is) to work at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in Pittsburgh as an Integration Intern. If you know anything about Reedsville, you would know that it will be quite the transition and I’m not sure if I’m ready for it. All my life, I imagined myself staying in my hometown or nearby areas to work, and later, to raise a family. I have just never been one that enjoys change. I chose Juniata College for many different reasons including an incredible environment, hands-on learning, and an opportunity to continue playing football, but also because it was only 45 minutes away from home. As I started working and preparing for the future by attending various workstations, career fairs, and interviews, it hit me that the field of Information Technology has so many different opportunities. That being said, 9 times out of 10, they are in some massive building in the middle of a city.

The Steel Tower that I will be working in on the 22nd floor!

Yeah, that line pretty much sums it up. I decided that I wanted to get out of my comfort zone this summer and give the “big city” a shot. This would be the best time to do it, since next year i’ll be expecting to take a position, find a home, and start my family. I knew deep down that even though I was certain it wouldn’t be for me, I had to do it or i’ll regret it 10, 15, or 20 years down the road. When you’re young and don’t have much to lose, that’s when you should take the risks.

So here we are today. I’m about to head to Pittsburgh for the first time, work in an industry that I know nearly nothing about with people I’ve never met before, and hope to impress my employer in what is considered a “ten week interview”. I’ll be discussing my adventures, successes, and failures each week and hope to share with you my experience on this wild internship.


Week 1: 06/09/17

At around 3PM on Saturday, I started my drive to Pittsburgh. I had never driven this far before, and I was anxious to get settled in. About a month before I accepted the internship, I had talked to a recent grad and good friend Chris about the living situation and options in the city. He was working at UPMC and participating in the ISDR, which was their rotational program for Information Services. After finding out that he was moving out in middle of June, I decided that subletting from him would be the best option. He really hooked us up. Not only would it be nice financially, but he could also provide his experiences going through the same program and share some tips and tricks with us. Bruno, another rising senior at Juniata College, was going to be working for UPMC as well so we split the rent.

I quickly found my way around the city, grabbing groceries at ALDI (it was news to me that they don’t give you bags), signing up for a gym membership, and stopping at Goodwill to find some additional items for the house. Bruno and I would be living in the family room until Chris moved out. The house wasn’t really what I was expecting, but it was definitely livable and cheap and that’s what mattered.

Our house that we will be living in over the next few months. Far from glamorous, but definitely livable!

On Monday and Tuesday, we traveled to Southside for “UPMC Beginnings”, which was their orientation on the values and expectations of all new hires. Although it drug on at times, as all similar events do, it was a good experience highlighted by meeting new people and getting UPMC-branded freebies. We had individual trainings on their core values, such as dignity, respect, quality, safety, excellence, and innovation to name a few.

On Wednesday, we “graduated” downtown to U.S. Steel Tower for our summer associate orientation, which had more much specific information about their expectations during our specific programs. I met with my manager, Darlene, for the first time, and was able to finally get an understanding of what I would be doing this summer. Three days of hearing about procedures, standards, and expectations really makes you anxious to start working.

Thursday was my first day on the job. I swiped into U.S. Steel with my newly acquired badge and started my journey to floor 22. There wasn’t really much direction aside from “take a right and take a left”, so thankfully I found my name and met a few of my new coworkers. I was there about 15 minutes early, so I took some time to just absorb the atmosphere and look out the window to see the beautiful view of Pittsburgh from quite the distance.

After getting set up, I met with Libby who would be my mentor and get me up to speed with the huge amount of standards and procedures that were required by the Message Router team. I’ll get more into my position and what i’ll be doing next week, since I’ve just began working through exercises to start getting acquainted to life on the MR team.


Week 2: 06/16/17

I expected a steep learning curve in an industry as large as healthcare, but there was so much to learn! The Message Router team have been very helpful in getting me up to speed, but the amount of acronyms, industry-specific terms, and verbiage that are needed just to communicate in this field could kill a tree. It amazes me that these people are so good at what they do, and it was almost discouraging. I’m here trying to figure out what the third word means in a message request and Libby already knows the API that they flow through and has found the message.

But these are the challenges that make the job exciting and worthwhile. I was given two huge binders full of the information on a system known as MR (Message Router), which was developed in 1995, before I was born! Although it feels a bit outdated, it is a fully functional way to do the main job at hand; translating messages through various hospital applications. There’s more to it than just that, but imagine working with a huge company such as UPMC and trying to make sense of all of the data that is passed between the applications.

For example, almost every hospital sends data to CCHIE, but CCHIE doesn’t want the same information that is sent to the referring and attending doctors, so the data needs to be routed through various formatters in order to arrive in the way that CCHIE wants. Some destinations actually use applications to manage their flows, so if the format is incorrect, the message might actually be rejected. These are the problems that we deal with on a day-to-day basis.

So learning these tools has been an adventure for sure, mostly due to it being an in-house piece of software. I’m not going to detail the specific aspects of MR, but I have learned how the data flows and how to manage it, how to find, replay, and edit messages, and how to manage the input we have to deliver a readable output for the next API.

The structure is great here by the way. There are meetings to keep everyone on track and give time to ask questions and receive input. We even have meetings twice a week to review new code, which was very helpful to see and to help understand what exactly is done. The on -boarding by the team was outstanding and really makes you feel at home!

To make this week better, the Penguins parade was this Wednesday! For those that don’t know, the Pittsburgh Penguins won the Stanley Cup in the NHL for the second year in a row. They had a parade each year this happened that went from 11–12, which many employees left the office for!

The Pens parade! All hail Lord Stanley!

Week 3: 06/23/17

So I actually was on vacation for this whole week in Myrtle Beach, SC. My mother didn’t take too kindly to missing her son on the trip, so I caved and took an early vacation. I wouldn’t recommend this, especially when you’re working with something new after being trained on it, but it happens I guess.

A vacation is nice every once in a while and South Carolina was beautiful!!

Now that most of the story background has already been written, I want to start focusing on different takeaways from each week. This is something I frequently do at work, as it’s not only important that you see that what you’re doing is not only impactful to the company, but also to yourself. For this week, I wanted to talk about the importance of good notes and documentation.

Last week, I mentioned a bit about doing table updates, but I didn’t go into detail. So from a non-technical perspective, tables are essentially a list of data, such as room numbers or approved identification numbers. So when you swipe your gold card at Juniata College, you are a part of a table that says you are a student, faculty, or staff member. In a hospital, you may register as a visitor and given a card to slide, which is added to table in a database to allow you access to the room until you leave and it’s deactivated.

There are also translation tables, which take an input and push an output. Web forms use this a lot. So if a doctor is filling out paperwork on an online portal and he selects the field ‘NUTS’ under ‘Allergies’, a translation table may be used to push that to another system that only takes input for ‘NONUTSEDIBLE’. These are a bit more complicated, but aren’t all that hard to work with.

So the reason behind explaining the tables is that each week, someone is typically on-call to deal with these “apages”. Since I’m the new guy and training with all of this stuff, I’ve gotten many pages sent to me to handle. I had a document passed to me from Kathy with a very long process on how to edit these tables. This process typically works as follows: refreshing your workspace to get the most recent versions of each file, checking to see if the file is checked out by another user, checking out the file, making the change, checking in the file, cycling the interfaces within the test environment to ensure everything works, promoting the file, and then finally cycling the interfaces in production. It may seem like a lot because frankly, it is.

With this process, there’s so many problems that can go wrong. You might not have the most recent version, the file could be checked out, the data in the request could be wrong or vague, you could make an error inputting the data, or you could cycle the wrong interfaces. Any one of these would cause a real-time problem in the system. If I promote a table change that doesn’t have the right information in it, a doctor might be given the wrong information about the allergy or a nurse might not be able to get in a secure location.

This is why you need to slow down when you first start, take your time, and DOCUMENT EVERYTHING. I started printing out the requests and going through line by line to ensure everything is correct, because waiting for a change is better than an incorrect or improper change.


Week 4: 06/30/17

I’m back in Pittsburgh and this has been an incredibly long, busy, and stressful, yet productive, week. On my way back from South Carolina, I kept thinking about a few key events for the week. I had our quarterly staff meeting for our extended department, a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball game to attend as a networking event, and a kick-off presentation to give. It would be a lot to worry about alongside my typical work, so I would have to put in a lot of hours this week!

To start things off on Monday, I had a dry run for the presentation that I would be giving on Thursday. This was with Rachel from the Campus Programs department, who was very kind as to give me someone to practice to after I missed the deadline while at the beach. I have to say that building a presentation about yourself can be easy, but it turned out very difficult to talk about myself without feeling a bit arrogant. So I traveled to her floor and gave the presentation to her and a few other employees who’s cubes happened to be beside where I was presenting. I got some feedback, and made a few adjustments, still nervous for the week.

The stage was set for our presentations on the 62nd floor. A lot of nerves for a three minute presentation.

On Wednesday, we had out quarterly staff meeting with everyone who falls under Darlene. This included the MR team, Epic, and Cerner, all whom we work closely with. It wouldn’t have been a big deal as it was a lot of information that didn’t pertain to me, such as events happening after I leave, but the bombshell dropped that morning that I would be giving my presentation to all of them as well! I felt comfortable this time around, but we had a doctor as a guest speaker talking about the future of IT in healthcare who went 25 minutes over, so I felt rushed. But to spare you the details I made it out alive and made some good impressions. Oh, and it was a pot luck with fantastic food (shoutout to Raghavan and Amy for my favorite plates).

Later that night, Bruno and I made our way to the Pirates game to meet up with a lot of executives and the other summer associates. We were meeting a lot of them for the first time, and it felt good to see that they were going through similar situations in their placements. Networking is so important and may seem silly at times, but the way I look at it is that it’s a whole lot better than sitting there awkwardly. We met about 75% percent of the Information Services interns that we would be sharing a conference room with to give our presentations the next morning.

Did I mention that these presentations were on the 62nd floor and that it contained over 40 interns and executives? Yeah, pretty intimidating. Thankfully, I got some good feedback from both of my mock runs and I felt like I hit it out of the park. We stayed and networked for a bit, but after a long week, I was ready to work on my projects and most importantly, to relax.

So in terms of my projects, I continued to work on apages and started a project for Kevin that involves consolidating four formatters into one, so that in the future we only have to make one change instead of four. I will discuss it more next week.


Week 5: 07/07/17

So things this week have been slowing down a bit, but there’s so much that I haven’t talked about due to so much going on in my Pittsburgh experience. There’s so many things I could highlight, even on the weekends, that have more to do with this internship and experience than you could imagine.

A picture from one of the many Pirates games that I’ve attended during my time in Pittsburgh.

About two weeks ago, I met with Kevin to discuss a project that involved taking four formatters that route data from their sources to a clinic named AES. I had felt comfortable working with the components of the interfaces (imaps and omaps) and with the tool itself, known as Architect. I was eager to get started, but before I could, I had trace the flow from the destination of AES to each of the sources to determine what interface I would have to consolidate into my new one. I ran into a few walls with this, as the flow that I had access to in test was different than production, but we were able to figure out later exactly which omaps needed to be consolidated.

The different components were CARD, IMG, CPTH, and DOCS, and they were all in very different formats. See, the messages and data that are sent are transferred over in specific nodes and then we map those nodes to format the message how the clinic or application wants it. We use the HL7 healthcare standard at UPMC. All of these different segments are mapped in the imap (MSH, PID, PV1, OBR, OBX are all common) and then the ones needed are mapped in the omap.

So for example, CARD may be the only application to use the MSH:9 node and all applications might use the PID:14, but to pass different information. This became the struggle because it wasn’t all straight forward. It was a lot of problem solving and coding for various situations. For the technical people out there, it was a lot of IF, ELSE conditional statements, but we would have to compare them using something. So with that wall in place, I continued to work on table changes as they rolled in and they really rolled in on Fridays!

We also had a meeting with Shireen, who oversees and mentors the ISDRs and ISSAs, about the Information Services Division itself. We learned all of the different departments to work in, what positions were offered, and how the promotions work. There are over 1200 people working for UPMC in ISD alone, and I think that the rotational program is something that I am very interested to learn more about.


Week 6: 07/14/17

We wrapped this week up with a lot of progress on various projects. Using a field that was unique to all four of the routers that needed consolidated, I was able to finally make the omap work! There is a lot of redundant code at this point, such as “IF (CARD) do this, IF (IMG) do this, ELSE do this”. After a few minor bumps in the road this week, things are wrapping up nicely.

I was also assigned a project by Betsy last Friday that I was able to start this week. All of the applications that route to CCHIE aren’t accounting for daylight savings time (DST). Due to this issue, there are a few days during the year that all of the messages they receive are skipped due to conflict. This is obviously an issue that needs to be resolved, even though it’s only really a problem for one or two days a year.

I had to compile a list of every interface that sends to CCHIE, and the OMAP associated with each of them. After determining what needs changed, we need to pull additional messages from the source to see if they are even receiving a timezone from the sending application. Due to my limited control, I’m currently waiting on someone to pull these messages for me.

We also had the chance to visit the UPMC Children’s Hospital this week. As summer associates, we are able to sign up for tours of the various hospitals, which is very cool! It also allows us to get a better understanding of what our role is and how what we do in corporate is directly affecting those seeing patients or the patients themselves. The tour lasted about 45 minutes, and we were able to see the processes they used, along with touring the different rooms including the recovery rooms, operation rooms, and ICUs. Seeing the smiles of the kids playing with games in the play rooms was a treat!

We toured Children’s Hospital this week, and we have three more hospitals to tour before the summer ends!

And as always, we had a lot of apages roll in this week. To give you a bit more background, we have two (or three) environments at UPMC; test, production, and our sandboxes. When you check out a file to edit, it is placed in your sandbox and you can modify it without directly impacting anything. Once promoted, it goes to test, which is simply a backup system that can be used to provide insight on the interfaces if they are having trouble. Finally, there is production, where you actually see the interfaces in use. Due to being a summer associate, I was never granted access to production, so completing my projects and apages completely on my own isn’t an option. Thankfully, Kathy has been able to cycle the interfaces in production once I promote them.


Week 7: 07/21/17

I can’t believe there are only a few weeks left. Although I have continued to grow and learn more and more each day on the job, I can’t help but think that it’s gone so fast! I now understand why managers limit the amount of projects that we can actually work on, as by the time a summer associate finally has their footing, it’s time to leave! I actually met with Shireen on Tuesday to discuss not only these feelings, but how the ISDR (Information Services Division Rotational Program) functions and works.

Now the ISDR seems like a really interesting opportunity from the outside, and the deeper you dig, the more attractive it seems. UPMC hasn’t been running this program long (I think 3 years), yet it has attracted a surplus of talented individuals to various departments. So how it works is that once accepted into the ISDR program, you are placed into your first of four rotations. These six-month rotations give you just enough time to learn and understand various jobs and departments, but if you aren’t interested, it’s not too long either. As someone who has dabbled in just about everything regarding IT, this would be an excellent opportunity to find what I’m really interested in; something I would want to do for a good portion of my life.

We discussed this and other incentives, including executive exposure, evaluations of strengths and weaknesses, and promotion upon graduation of the program, to name a few. It was a brief conversation, yet very successful to say the least. I will definitely be applying for this opportunity as someone who is eager to understand and learn the company and industry from various perspectives.

Our tour of Magee-Women’s Hospital concluded with a trip to the garden, a nice relaxing environment with homegrown vegetables and a pond!

On Thursday, we had our second tour. This time, it was at Magee-Women’s Hospital in Oakland. This was a much deeper and overall more interesting tour than the one at Children’s. Our guide went through various rooms, explaining the vigorous operations that took place in some. Magee is known mostly for their birthing center, but they also have a cancer center, research center, and ICUs. We were put in the shoes of both the individuals that would be going through these procedures and the doctors/nurses/physicians that would be assisting them.

Work wise, I finished the router consolidation project and it is awaiting approval from Kevin. The sample messages were all fed through the downstream systems and played into both routers, producing the same result, which means it was successful. Also, I met Erica, the new ISDR who just joined our department. She will be the one sending me the messages for the DST project, so once she gets trained and caught up to speed, I should be able to continue progress on that one.


Week 8: 07/28/17

One of my biggest takeaways from this internship is definitely some insight on the healthcare industry. Whether it be working with HL7, which is the standard for sending data, or learning about the day-to-day lives of not only analysts, but also practitioners, I have gained new perspective. This week, I was able to go on two more tours. The first was a private tour of CLB, which is UPMC’s main laboratory for all sorts of testing. Along for the ride was both Erica and Sonia, and once we all arrived, we headed upstairs to meet with the guide. It turns out that we were getting a tour of the facility at the same time that Sunquest, a partner and provider of lab tech, was getting theirs. I saw a lot of people that I didn’t know, but recognized a few faces from around the Steel Tower and various networking events.

While the guide was throwing five-syllable medical jargon that everyone pretended to understand, I was trying to make sense of the area with my eyes. Each floor had dozens of workers doing testing such as blood work, drug tests, and many intricate procedures. The best part for me was when we went to the bottling area, where lab techs from all around the building sent their results to be bottled, labeled, capped, and pushed to the proper destination. The machine they had doing all of this would take in the vial, scan the tag, relabel it and close it, and send it down one of many paths to go to the other hospitals. They actually had this underground system built to pass these samples between nearly 15 different facilities in Pittsburgh! The technology there was mind-blowing and fascinating to see in person.

The other tour we went on was of WISER, which was UPMC’s main training facility. This is where students, graduates, and seasoned medical professionals would go to learn and get approval based on their performance in the test environment. We watched our guide perform various procedures from inserting an IV to more complicated measures like incisions for assisted breathing. They had an operator that was behind the scenes for the main rooms, adjusting the animatronic “models” to breathe, talk, and even go into cardiac arrest. This would definitely be a great way to get some hands-on experience for a medical student. We each had the opportunity to try these out for ourselves if we wanted to, and since there wasn’t any risk involved, it was cool to try it out!

Another intern trying his hand at assisted breathing through the nose!

In terms of actual work, I continued to work on the DST project. Erica had finally gained access to her account, so she could now pull the messages that I needed to change and test the various OMAPS. At this point, nearly all of the interfaces have been altered, and I’m currently in talks with a few analysts that need to make adjustments on their ends before I can move forward. This will be done early next week and will likely be my last project that I will work on for the summer internship.

Finally, I got my performance review from Dar and Libby. They had some very helpful feedback — some negative but mostly positive — about my internship, and we discussed all that I have accomplished during my stay. They both agreed that I had done a “Superior” job (4/5 on UPMC’s grading scale) and they suggested that I take a class or two regarding the healthcare industry to learn a bit more about it to get ahead of the curve for future employment. I was very satisfied with their feedback, and I’m beyond ready for the final week! That’ll consist of finishing my DST project, building a slide deck of accomplishments, an executive lunch, and an interview for the ISDR program. Wish me luck!

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Kyle Bargo

Written by

Student, Athlete, and Innovator

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