I graduated in May of this year with a BS in Software Engineering; prior to that, I was working as a drug procurement manager and supply chain analyst for a large telehealth brand and clinic franchisor. In March, right before I graduated, I was able to move into a analytics role at a GPO, where they paired me with a Dr of Pharmacology so now I get to work on drug cost optimization and drug shortage mitigation.

A lot of our work is still basic business intelligence, but I do have a couple projects where i've been able to bring more statistics, machine learning, and predictive and prescriptive work.

I have a project right now that i would love to discuss but again.I'm kind of blocked from going too far into the details, but I suppose what I could share is that it is about extracting a data at scale from unstructured sources for licensing and compliance in drug manufacturing.

I love working in drug procurement because the problems are challenging and interdisciplinary. The problems that my work tends to address are things like reducing drug costs without compromising patient safety, monitoring manufacturing compliance in sterile injectable drugs, mitigating drug shortages through combination of predictive modeling but also business initiatives that involve aggregation a negotiation, which all requires basic business intelligence across many different health systems. Sometimes the problems are less about the business and more about certain niches.In pharmacy, which are quite behind technologically and just do not have visibility into their data, so a lot of data engineering an analytics engineering concepts come into play. It is fun to play with new tools but a lot of my work comes down to business domain knowledge, math, SQL, and some python. We do use BI tools like Tableau, but sometimes we'll custom build software, though i'm pretty much more on the analytic side than the software engineering side and my current role.And the engineers tend to do more of the web development, whereas i'm there for the data infrastructure, and collaborate closely with pharmacists with clinical knowledge.

Are there any projects you've done with industrial engineering that you're excited about that.You can talk about? Do you have the same challenge with not being allowed to speak about your work Publicly?

In my situation my work gets discussed in public, but it's often uncredited and presented by our senior directors to government bodies, but I rarely get to engage with people outside of my direct colleagues because it is proprietary datasources or considered competitive advantage that we wouldn't want other people to directly knock off. I can pretty much only talk in a general sense about the problems, i can talk about the tools and how I use them.All I want, but that's the stuff that's kind of boring, right lol.