Laurens Kraal, PhD

Laurens Kraal, PhD

Dr. Kraal received his Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from UCSF, during which he was also involved with multiple life-sciences startups. Most recently, he held product and data roles at a microbiome diagnostics company. Dr. Kraal is passionate about making health data available, understandable, and actionable.

PROJECTS 

Clinical Stress: Clinician distress is starting to become recognized as an epidemic in our healthcare system especially among Intensive Care and Emergency Department professionals. Burnout in healthcare workers affects their well-being, but also the quality of their patient care. Distress indicators include depersonalization and feeling a lack of personal and professional accomplishment. To combat this, I want to use data communication and visualizations to help engage clinicians with their patients’ journeys and outcomes. Receiving feedback and reflecting on the care provided, seeing the progression of their patients’ stories, and getting an overview of the results of their work could potentially improve job satisfaction, reduce professional distress and burnout symptoms, and improve patient care.

Predicting Emergency Department staff shortages during the COVID-19 pandemic using machine learning: Front-line healthcare workers are at high risk of contracting the novel coronavirus. The presence of a sufficient number of healthcare workers at all times during this pandemic is essential for the health of the rest of society. The goal of our study is to develop a machine learning model to predict staff shortages based on healthcare workers’ risk of coronavirus infection. We are partnering with Emergency Department (ED) providers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), who report an immediate need for staff forecasting to help guide personnel resource management. We will combine several sources of data, including patient electronic health records, staff scheduling, personal protective equipment inventory, and a custom-designed questionnaire to quantify healthcare workers’ personal coronavirus risk factors. Our study will help the UCSF ED proactively manage essential staff resources, which has important implications for emergency preparedness, hospital operations, and the survival of patients.