Partner
Common Ground Health
Industry
Healthcare
Goal
Build a platform to facilitate data sharing and collaborative research among community stakeholders.
Approach
Batch Processing
Machine Learning
Stream Processing
The Opportunity
Common Ground Health (CGH), a health research and planning organization for 9 Finger Lakes counties, sought to develop a data platform that would make community health information easier to share and enable collaborative research. With the advent of the COVID19 epidemic, the need for a collaborative system became urgent. RDSC created a platform to process, store, and analyze data from Covid19 screenings coming from URMC, Rochester Regional health Systems, and a Public Chat bot. Once developed, the platform could be customized to serve community collaboration for research and data sharing.
The Challenge
RDSC had to create a platform to correlate disparate data in a variety of formats coming from three different sources, each of which had a different system for data entry and concerns about protecting the privacy of the data. For COVID19 data alone, there could be some 40,000 to 50,000 screening responses daily. The automated solution had to stream both batched and real time data, enable analytics, and create rules for who could have access.
“RDSC worked quickly with us to develop a solution that would serve not only our needs relative to COVID19, but promises to facilitate collaborative research and data sharing that will benefit residents of the Finger Lakes in the future.”
– Amie Kulak, Director of Analytics Common Ground Health
The Solution
RDSC created a cloud-based system that automated ingestion of data from multiple sources and transformed raw data into a common format, providing an analytics framework through which researchers can run algorithms. Application programming interfaces (APIs) enabled users to extract data for algorithms, monitor data entering the system in real time, and display the output of analytics and reports through a dashboard. The system governed access and automated notification to the right people that data has been received.
The Result
The project illuminated how the strengths of both organizations complement one another. CGH, with its close connection to the community and its understanding of what kinds of data are meaningful and actionable, needed a partner like RDSC who could create a platform that enabled its health data to be processed, stored and analyzed. The platform RDSC built will enable CGH to maximize the impact on the community of the insights generated from its health care programs by providing data access to key community stakeholders and researchers.
