Making healthcare accessible with code
By: Hillary Mclauchlin
Tags: Health Technology, Social Impact, Coding It Forward, Students, Interview

Coding it Forward: Tell us a little about your background. How did you find yourself studying computer science and mathematics?

Georgiana Wright: I am a Jamician immigrant–my family and I immigrated to America around 2000. Right now, I’m studying at Alabama A&M University. My background with computer science was very weird. When my parents immigrated, they were working 2–3 jobs so I was often alone at home with my brother who was taking computer science classes. When he was babysitting me, he let me read the textbook and that was my first introduction to computer science. He taught me the key terms and I thought, “Wow, this is really cool!” When we had enough money as a family, my dad purchased a really old Dell with Vista on it. I would spend my time on it trying to figure out stuff when my brother wasn’t on the computer.

When I was younger, I was dead set on going to pharmacy school and being a pharmacist. Around that time, I was either going to do pharmacy school or join the military because that’s how my high school was; it was either you go to military school or you don’t do anything. I got into robotics and I was also immersing myself in computer science. When I got accepted to A&M, I was like okay I hate biology, I like coding and could see myself doing this as a career. If I really wanted to go into machine learning and commit to graduate school, I needed to study mathematics to get caught up with everyone else.

CIF: Could you tell our readers about ANGEL SCAN. What is it and how did the project come about?

GW: When my mom went into the hospital, there were a lot of issues surrounding her procedure, her stay, and the communication between her radiologists and surgeons. The radiologists made several mistakes with her medical images and she had to go in and out of surgery several times–more than her body could take. When she finally got out of the hospital after her third visit, we got her hospital bills. She was insured, but the radiologist charged one of the highest charges. That drove our family into debt; I don’t have a college fund because of the hospital’s mistakes. We couldn’t sue the hospital because it was private and has a big monopoly around the area.

I found out that there were other families suffering from the same thing and I didn’t want to feel helpless. I was learning more about machine learning and was wondering if there could be a tool for low-income patients who don’t have radiologists in their area. Especially in rural Alabama, people don’t have access to hospitals. They have to go a long distance to a big city to get medical imaging, but what if there was an affordable way to have a machine scan medical images–especially mammograms–for clinics, hospitals, or anyone who needed them? The goal with ANGEL SCAN was to create a machine learning application to scan abnormalities in mammograms.

One of the problems that I was having with ANGEL SCAN was that there was a company that had a similar idea and had a patent. As I talked to my friends pursuing projects that had social impact, they told me to expand what I wanted for the project. Now we are changing ANGEL SCAN to not only scan for mammograms but all medical imaging. I don’t care if my product doesn’t make money but I want to implement it so that low-income families have a chance to actually get the right care. Medicaid doesn’t really cover medical imaging; there’s a $50 dollar cap for mammogram reimbursements.

CIF: Aside from hard technical skills, what do you think is important for someone looking to build technology in the social impact space?

GW: One of the biggest things has been having a mentor and a community. When I started ANGEL SCAN, I did not have great Python skills. I was a beginner, at best, and my high school did not have any computer science classes so I was pretty much on my own going around my city asking people if they knew machine learning and where I should start. I stumbled upon this amazing lady, Angelina–she’s my mentor to this day. Her husband was doing a machine learning project and she was helping him as well. She said, “I can help you. We can break down where you can start and how to get ethical data.” My high school didn’t really encourage scientific projects, I was pretty much alone asking for help and she guided me to where I needed to go. I was still a high school student so I didn’t really understand getting data from certain people–especially medical data–and she really pushed me in the right direction.

CIF: As a young person yourself, what would your advice be for other students looking to use their tech skills in the social impact space?

GW: Stop and look at your communities. We’re in a technology age in which there are certain things that are trending right now and, even though they are trending, there are a lot of things in your community that are neglected. I really didn’t understand the hospital monopoly in my area until I stopped and looked at the consequences of their actions and talked to other people in the community about these issues that are often neglected because people think that they will be fixed. It just takes a person stepping-up and talking to more people and applying your technical skills to help your own community.

CIF: Any last words of wisdom for our readers?

GW: Don’t feel pressure to have results immediately. I feel like I put a lot of pressure on myself to have deadlines for my product in the beginning. When I’m looking at my results now as a college freshman compared to my results as a high school senior, I made a lot of mistakes because I put so much pressure on myself. You’re just one individual and you’re trying to fix a problem that the hospital-industry could not fix. Put less pressure on yourself and try to gather a community. Don’t try to force yourself into doing anything in a certain amount of time, especially if it’s a product that’s going to help a lot of people.