For my final project this summer I performed a retrospective chart review of eighty patients who had colorectal surgeries between May 2022 and June 2023. Thirty of the patients within my study participated in the multidisciplinary prehabilitation program that I have discussed in the past while the other fifty patients experienced the standard care of treatment revolving around their surgery. The main question my study aimed to analyze was if the rate of complications from surgery could be lowered by participating in the rehabilitation program. I collected various data points on each of my patients about prep before surgery, ongoing medication at the time of surgery, surgical history, vitals, readmission, morphine milligrams equivalence, smoking history, complications, and re-operation to name a few. I also used the Clavien-Dindo classification scale to create a comprehensive complications index (CCI) score for each patient. I developed a code to clean and format the data I collected and analyzed my data using logistical and linear regression analysis, Mann-Whitney U tests, chi-square tests, and Fisher exact test.
I will be presenting my data later this week at our monthly research meeting and am in the process of writing an abstract for my project. I am excited to present the results of my study and interested to hear comments from others. I have loved going through the process of completing this project. It has been very rewarding to be a part of almost every part of the process and see the final results after entering and working with my data for many hours. I also believe the results of my study will greatly help to identify improvements the prehabilitation program may need and bring more interest to our current study of active prehab patients. Overall, I have loved working in clinical research. It has been fascinating to learn about how projects are started and see the process they go through before and after they officially begin. I have also enjoyed learning more about inflammatory bowel disease and the different treatments that are available. As a computational biology major, I truly felt like I applied many of the aspects of my major in my job and it was exciting to use some of the skills I have acquired through the curriculum thus far. I am looking forward to the upper-level computational biology labs which will widen my skill set toolbox for future research positions.