Initial situation
Building an in-house data science team, with a technological focus on R
Goal
Bessere Einbindung von Daten und Analysen in die Entscheidungen und Prozesse im Klinikalltag
Solution
Konzeption, Implementierung und Betrieb einer Dateninfrastruktur
Challenge
The German Heart Center of Charité (DHZC) operates the world’s largest artificial heart program by case numbers and is one of Germany’s leading centers for heart and lung transplantation. To promote the best possible care for patients, a key objective of the DHZC is to make processes and decision-making pathways even more data-driven.
For this reason, the DHZC has begun to establish data science as a central building block to support everyday clinical practice. In addition to building an in-house data science team, this also involves implementing a high-performance data infrastructure and developing applications & dashboards for user-friendly information provision. From a technological perspective, the focus is on the open-source language R, which the DHZC has so far used selectively and locally to develop analytical applications.
Goal
The DHZC aims to create optimal framework conditions for its own data science initiatives in order to generate valuable insights that support medical staff and hospital management in their daily work.
Solution
To achieve this goal, the DHZC relies on holistic data science empowerment from eoda – ranging from infrastructure setup and knowledge transfer to the development of productive applications.
The starting point of the collaboration was the establishment of a data infrastructure to create professional framework conditions for development with R and for the provision of analyses. The technical core of the environment set up by eoda consists of Posit’s enterprise products:
- Posit Workbench as a central development environment for data science teams
- Posit Connect as a publishing platform for the easy sharing and management of data-driven insights and applications such as Shiny
- Posit Package Manager for the management and secure provisioning of R and Python packages
As a certified Posit partner, eoda was able to support the DHZC from consulting through procurement and implementation to long-term support.
In addition to implementing and setting up the Posit solutions, eoda also took care of integrating existing infrastructure components such as databases, GitLab, and Azure Active Directory. By using Ansible, an infrastructure-as-code approach was introduced, enabling the automated, consistent, and reproducible provisioning of infrastructure components.
Beyond the initial deployment of the infrastructure, eoda provides support within the framework of SLAs and takes responsibility for the continuous further development of the IT environment. This focuses in particular on establishing best practices and the automation of workflows—such as the development and deployment of in-house R and Python packages.
Result
As a result, the DHZC now has modern dashboards and an infrastructure that help to capture information more quickly and derive the right actions—both today and in the future. The new data infrastructure serves as the foundation for the development of data-driven applications and analyses. In this area as well, the DHZC relies on eoda’s expertise.
“Development, deployment, and operations: with its expertise and experience, the eoda team covers the entire data science process.
Working with eoda therefore moves us forward decisively on many levels and is a great pleasure for us.”
Prof. Dr. Alexander Meyer | Professor of Clinical AI and Data Science | German Heart Center of Charité
The next step: Find out how we helped the DHZC by developing an R Shiny app for improved monitoring
Get started now:
We look forward to exchanging ideas with you.
Your expert on Data-Infrastructures:
Ricarda Kretschmer
infrastructure@eoda.de
Tel. +49 561 87948-370
