Regenstrief Institute: Visualizing Healthy Data

The challenge: A rapid response on various fronts

In a national effort to securely gather and exchange data on the COVID-19 pandemic, Regenstrief Institute was selected by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to serve as the Linkage Honest Broker (LHB) of the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C)—helping scientists understand the outbreak and develop treatments to stop COVID-19.

In a separate but parallel effort, Regenstrief Institute embarked on an ambitious project to create multiple real-time dashboards to model data about the pandemic, while making it accessible and understandable to public health officials, policy makers and the general public. The goal? Provide the tools needed to track COVID-19 illnesses, hospitalizations and deaths.

"TEKsystems provided valuable and timely technical assistance, helping to ensure that critical Regenstrief initiatives such as the N3C Linkage Honest Broker are successful.”

Regenstrief sought a partner to assist them with these data efforts—allowing Regenstrief informaticians to focus on what’s important: developing the core LHB services critical to gaining a better understanding of the pandemic. Enter TEKsystems.

Our solution: Purposeful support

Steeped in the healthcare industry, with a proven record in data analytics and insights, expertise in Tableau, and most importantly, devotion to data accuracy, TEKsystems assisted Regenstrief in its critical role of LHB for the N3C by providing a sample volumetric data model.

Data can only be as useful as the accessibility, visualization, modeling, and governance that’s behind it. As a Tableau Strategic Alliance partner, we performed an analysis of Regenstrief Institute’s Tableau environment, their current data architecture, and their data collection processes. A year after the dashboards were launched, we provided recommendations to Regenstrief informaticians as new capabilities were added to the dashboards.

We quickly delivered the technical skills and experience needed to support sophisticated data visualizations for the dashboards while Regenstrief Data Services (RDS) directed its resources to data ingestion, analysis and the development of innovative solutions.

“TEKsystems provided assistance in several areas including data engineering, integration and modernizing our Tableau dashboards in support of COVID-related analytics.”

TEKsystems leveraged its partnership with Talend to provide Regenstrief with a roadmap for recommended future data ingestion. We also worked with the Institute’s public relations team to ensure successful Tableau implementation of the Regenstrief brand.

Powerful partnership: Data-driven care

Side-by-side, TEKsystems and Regenstrief Institute addressed the challenges of securely assembling patient-level data that is traditionally fragmented and difficult to use across large-scale clinical research efforts.

"TEKsystems worked on four distinct (and mutually exclusive) workstreams in parallel and delivered work products for each workstream. If it wasn’t for TEKsystems, we would not have had the capacity and data visualization experience to be able to successfully complete these four workstreams in parallel."

Our partnership enabled a modernized data platform to rapidly drive groundbreaking clinical analytics insights, dashboards and reporting in the face of dynamic change and uncertainty. Our newly stabilized and streamlined dashboard helped to augment official COVID-19 health data and provide support to public health professionals, health systems and other partners.