A day in the life of a Principal Data Engineer at MOHT

A Day in the Life at MOHT series

One of MOHT’s strengths stems from having a pool of talents from diverse backgrounds, facilitating the cross-diffusion of learning and insights within the organisation and across the ecosystem.

“A Day in the Life at MOHT” is a MOHT blog series where featured colleagues relate how their individual talent, experience and practice has enriched MOHT’s tapestry of contributions towards the transformation of Singapore’s healthcare.

In the fifth edition, we look at a day in the life of Preventive Medicine Senior Resident, Dr Kuhanesh Janardanan, who works closely with the Integrated General Hospital team and led the Community Hospital of the Future initiative.

Contributed by Dr Julian Kuiyu Chang

Although I have been serving as Principal Data Engineer at MOHT since February 2021, I was actually trained in electrical engineering during my undergraduate studies. I was “accidentally” introduced to the fascinating world of neural networks by my FYP supervisor Professor Yen Hsu-Chun. I vividly recall the first Hopfield networks paper he recommended me to read. Thereafter, I went all-in, studying artificial neural networks in the 1990’s in windy Hawaii, and eventually completed a Ph.D. thesis in Texas on non-linear dimensionality reduction using manifolds in Texas.

My career spans start-ups, tech giants and the academia. After graduating in 2000, I worked at a US start-up. Post 9-11, in 2003, I left the US for Singapore to teach computer engineering at NTU until 2013. My research interest was sentiment analysis and information retrieval or search engines.

In 2016, I joined WiFi MasterKey (WiFi), where, as Chief Scientist, I was fortunate to work on terabytes of daily incoming data long before companies like Shopee, Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance set up their operations in Singapore.

My first foray into healthcare was at Asus’ AI division. As senior engineering manager, I worked on projects at the intersection of healthcare and AI, such as an app that routes outpatients to different specialists based on their symptoms, and MIA (Medical Intelligence Access) – a PubMed search engine.

In November 2020, I met Prof Robert Morris, Chief Technology Strategist at MOHT. MOHT was a 2-year-old organisation then, and doing work that is a confluence of all the things I enjoy: data science and tech, innovation, healthcare. I was very inspired and impressed by Prof Robert’s energy and passion for healthcare. Like me, he has a background in tech, and is at the stage of his career and life where he wants to give back to society, by harnessing his skills and knowledge in data science and technology to improve the way health is delivered to patients. He was able to articulate the development, the mission and purpose of each project he oversees. One project stood out for me: mindline.sg. mindline.sg is a web-app platform providing validated self-assessment, evidence-informed self-care exercises, AI Chatbot, and peer-support forum.

Since joining MOHT in February 2021, I’ve been a part of the data science and technology team and working on mindline.sg. I helped set up a data platform called MDP (MOHT Data Platform) which facilitates real-time analysis of data from mindline.sg. Prior to MDP, data analysis was done by individual data scientist or analyst using excel or python charting, with csv file exchange as the most common way of data sharing. With MDP, dataset and analytical results can be easily shared among various teams and colleagues. Most importantly, MDP maintains just one copy of the database, instead of the classical two stage approach.
As healthcare was an unplanned career move, it is a relatively new domain for me. While I have been mostly focused on the technological aspect of healthcare, I now have an opportunity to contribute to digital mental health, working on a system that facilitates the mental health and wellness of youths, working adults, and the general population.

Recently, I have been working with the Integrated Health Promotion team on their Digital Local Connect initiative, a one-stop resource for community volunteers and service providers (general practitioners) to find relevant services and activities to recommend to residents during face-to-face visits.

I like the variety of tasks I get to do daily, ranging from app development (mainly python) to SQL data and visual analysis to gain deeper insights into the mindline.sg data, to updating the ETL (Extract Transform Load) scripts that runs daily to clean and extract mindline.sg backend data. From time to time, I do some DevOps tasks such as patching a module or updating a component on the backend Kubernetes system that is serving MDP.

Any of the above tasks could require several hours or days, especially when conducting deep data analysis. Sometimes, we must model the data distribution, at several different combinations of dimensions, before we can find the cause. This is extremely enjoyable as I get a Eureka moment once I find the source.

Recent FriYay badminton with Hiran, Xinyan, Thisum, Young, Ye Sheng, Praveen

At MOHT, I get to work with consummate professionals at the top of their game. We work extremely hard, but we play hard too. I’m appreciative of FriYays, which is a once-a-month staff welfare initiative that allows staff to end the work day at 3.30pm. I usually take this time to play badminton with some of my colleagues. There are two strong badminton players at MOHT, who inspire me to improve and hopefully lose some weight!

What I enjoy about working at MOHT is the freedom to explore various professional areas that pique my interest. It is also immensely satisfying to see the direct impact our products and innovations have on the end users. I’m pleased to know my contributions can potentially touch the lives of others.

Finally, the collaborative atmosphere I experience at MOHT is incredible, something that I have never experienced in academia or any industry.

If you would like to make a difference to the lives of people, MOHT is a great place to start.

Julian (standing) posing for Mediacorp8 interview in 2022, with MOHT colleagues

Median time spent on each Wysa exercise sorted in descending order