Research

Merck & Company Partnership

The next generation of Health IT professionals needs an important combination of technical skills and the understanding of how to use health data appropriately. This unique partnership between Merck & Company and Moravian University gives students an opportunity to develop these abilities while they make contributions to Merck initiatives.

Over the past two years, Merck employees and Moravian University students have made significant contributions to two open-source projects through senior capstones, summer SOAR projects, internships and co-ops.

In 2014, a team developed an add-on module for the EMR system OpenMRS that allows users to collect aggregate, anonymized data through a REST-ful interface. In 2015, a team created a web-based application to graphically visualize Medicare billing data provided by DocGraph.

This collaborative effort has exposed nearly fifty students to real-world Health IT projects. Seven of these students became interns, and Merck now employs one of four students who were offered full-time jobs. Regardless of whether the students continued with Merck, they gained expertise in Health IT and numerous technologies not normally a part of the undergraduate computer science curriculum.