Deacon Spotlight: Brian Ostasiewski

Brian Ostasiewski (1998, BS Computer Science)

Director of Research Informatics at Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, NC

Tell us about your current job role and employer. What are you currently working on?

I’ve been with Wake Forest School of Medicine and the hospital system for almost 15 years now. My team provides the data infrastructure for enabling research studies and clinical trials. We pull data from the Electronic Health Record, other various clinical systems, registries, and various external data sets such as census data, and then we merge and aggregate this data, mapping to healthcare standards and resolving patient matching issues.

Over the last few years, we’ve gone from a five-hospital system, to a 42-hospital system with the Atrium partnership, and then to a 67-hospital system with the Advocate combination. The bulk of our work currently still involves the adapting to this larger enterprise. This entails scaling up our services to bring in the vastly larger amounts of data and provision it to a much larger pool of researchers according to their needs with security, HIPAA, and consent controls. Additionally, we build a lot of software tools and data analysis scripts, and we have to work with our IT colleagues to enable access across an enterprise that is still multiple separate computer networks.

What key personal and/or career experiences led you to where you are today?

I took a bit of a roundabout path to my current position. First off, after my junior year at Wake, I landed an internship with IBM that got me my first job out of college. Around the beginning of 2000, the dot-com boom hit, and I left IBM to come back to Winston-Salem to work for a startup. This company was doing 3D imaging, as well as structured radiology reporting, and served as my first foray into healthcare.

When that company got bought out, I had several smaller programming stints at various companies, involving telecom equipment, the trucking industry, and another startup working on network security. With each position, I built on a new technical skill set, which gave me a well-rounded set of skills and experiences leading teams of different types and compositions.

Ultimately, a professor I had at Wake reached out to me about coming to the hospital to help create the research informatics infrastructure, and getting back into the more meaningful work in healthcare really appealed to me.

What is the most challenging aspect of your job? How do you navigate that challenge?

The most challenging aspect of the job is managing the inconsistency of work. There are grant cycles throughout the year that drive spikes in demand for data. Combine this with how for every ten grants submitted we might get one awarded, and it makes it difficult to forecast and plan needed effort.

When a grant does get awarded, often work needs to start immediately, so I have to constantly balance staff so there are resources available to do the work without being overstaffed and idle, though idle is not often a problem as there’s always a wish list of improvement and innovation tasks.

What advice would you give to Wake Forest graduates about developing their personal life habits after college (finances, health, values, work/life balance)?

The best advice I received early was financial. It’s really important to save early if you can because that money will compound and grow over your career. If you’re able, contribute to your job’s 401K, particularly if there’s employer matching and maxing out your yearly Roth IRA contribution.

On the work/life balance side, I’d say you’re much freer in your early career, so that’s the time to gamble a bit more with startup opportunities or to take a higher paying consultant job with a higher likelihood of travel. It becomes much more difficult and unappealing to do these things later in life when you have a house and family and value your time and stability more.

Similarly, if you think you might want to pursue higher degrees, I’d explore that earlier. I got a second Bachelors degree when I was still single, and even then it was busy with my regular work demands. I’m amazed at my colleagues that have done Masters and PhD programs after they had kids. I think it’s a small proportion of people that can manage that without devolving into a combustible ball of stress.

We know that relationships are important for any kind of development. How do you build and maintain your network?

The most important relationships are the mentors you find early. They can show you the range of possibilities and provide you connections to other people in their network that can help you break in to a field or company that fits your interests. This is why I like to host internships – to give others the opportunities I had, particularly those that are typically underrepresented in the informatics field.

Often opportunities become available more because of who you know that what you know. When someone sees a hundred similar resumes, the one that comes with a personal reference that can vouch for your work and work ethic can set you apart. Also, for this reason, keep up the connections you make with fellow students and interns. It will be shockingly soon when the people you hung out with are all in leadership positions across a variety of industries.

Tell us about your mentoring relationships. What impact have these relationships had on your career and life?

I already spoke of this above, but I am eternally grateful for the professors I had at Wake and the other mentors that showed an interest in my development and progress.

What advice would you give to current Wake Forest students and/or young alumni who are interested in working in your industry?

When our interns first start out, a lot of them don’t have a great idea of what to expect based on their previous exposure to Data Science or Informatics. Seeing all the different jobs and roles that utilize those skills really opens their eyes to possible careers they could pursue. While getting an internship is a great experience, it’s also really useful to simply seek out people who are currently in a role doing something that sounds interesting to you and ask for an informal informational interview.

On the technical side, I will say with all the advances in things like AI and online search, it’s less important to have a storehouse of knowledge in your head (like knowing a programming language inside and out) but rather to have the skills to know how to use these advanced tools and how to discern what information is accurate or useful. It is better to have a good breadth of technical knowledge to lean on. Nowadays, a lot of the Masters programs in Data Science or Data Analytics do a nice job of giving you a necessary sampling of all the things.

What’s next for your career? What future goals or plans are you pursuing?

My future goals are really about making sure we scale the research data infrastructure across this giant enterprise in a way that sets us all up for success in the future – that includes me, my staff, faculty researchers, study teams, and ultimately the patients that will benefit from faster and better research into the conditions impacting them. There’s a lot of satisfaction in doing a job that makes a positive impact on the lives of your friends and family, because at some point we are all patients on the other side of that data.

Story published in November 2024. For current updates about Brian, visit his Linkedin.