Social Work Student Works on Research to Help Clinicians with Assessments
Undergraduate social work student Felix Preston is getting first-hand experience on one of the emerging ways that artificial intelligence, or AI, can effectively and ethically support clinical social work practice.
Working with a multidisciplinary team of faculty and student researchers, Felix is helping researchers effectively utilize assessments as data for additional research. The project focuses on coding an AI curation process to identify language in psychosocial assessments that have been anonymized and to detect the presence or absence of social determinants of health for pediatric patients undergoing heart transplants and their families.
Under the supervision of principal investigator Dr. Michael Killian, an associate professor with the FSU College of Social Work and co-director of the Initiative for the Advancement of Pediatric Transplant Health Research at FSU/UF Health, Felix is an active contributor to the annotation of psychosocial assessments and to curating these annotations.
The annotation and structured coding of psychosocial domains derived from these pre-transplant psychosocial assessments will generate a standardized, longitudinal data linking pre-transplant risk to post-transplant psychosocial trajectories. The annotation and coding will be directly integrated into predictive models of adherence and clinical outcomes for these patients. Furthermore, this coding and annotation work will be integrated into an AI-enhanced psychosocial assessment platform currently in development. Supported by the Florida State University and Amazon Web Services Research Acceleration Award, this platform aims to improve pre-transplant psychosocial assessment and care planning by enabling real-time risk scoring and clinical decision support for transplant social workers and multidisciplinary teams.
Felix noted just how life-changing the research experience has been on his interests and career trajectories. “I had never really considered research as a real option, but I have enjoyed my time on this project and would certainly consider making a shift towards research at some point in my career,” he shared. “This project also works well with healthcare issues, which has also expanded my interest in those kinds of problems.”
As a first-generation college student, Felix had his sights set on a counseling career through a psychology major when he first came to FSU. At an FSU Center for Academic Retention and Enhancement tabling event, he met some social work faculty who piqued his interest in clinical social work.
After changing his major to social work and taking a few classes, he realized he was most engaged in policy and advocacy work. His dive into research with Dr. Killian’s team expanded Felix’s interests even more. “Before working with Dr. Killian, I knew very little about healthcare-related issues, but my experience has taught me to be interested in the ways social work and healthcare fields overlap.
Working with Dr. Killian and his team even influenced Felix’s decision on where to complete his BSW internship, choosing to work with Big Bend Cares, which provides resources and support to people with HIV/AIDs.
Now in his final semester, Felix will attend Washington University in St. Louis to earn his MSW and Master of Social Policy, with the aim of working as a policy analyst or lobbyist. He is also interested in potentially earning a doctoral degree to pursue research later in his career.
“People in the social work field have a unique perspective born from our curriculum, the interdisciplinary nature of social work and the NASW Code of Ethics that drives practice,” Felix observed. “All of this informs not only how research is conducted but the questions that are asked.”