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Machine Learning

Machine Learning in population health: Creating conditions that ensure good health.

Machine Learning (ML) in healthcare has an affinity for patient-centred care and individual-level predictions. Population health deals with health outcomes in a group of individuals and the outcome distribution in the group. Both individual health and population health are not divergent, but at the same time, both are not the same and may require different approaches. ML in public health applications receives far less attention.

The skills available to public health organizations to transition towards an integrated data analytics is limited. Hence the latest advances in ML and artificial intelligence (AI) have made very little impact on public health analytics and decision making. The biggest barrier is the lack of expertise in conceiving and implementing data warehouse systems for public health that can integrate health information systems currently in use. 

The data in public health organizations are generally scattered in disparate information systems within the region or even within the same organization. Efficient and effective health data warehousing requires a common data model for integrated data analytics. The OHDSI – OMOP Common Data Model allows for the systematic analysis of disparate observational databases and EMRs. However, the emphasis is on patient-level prediction. Research on how patient-centred data models to observation-centred population health data models are the need of the hour.

We are making a difficult yet important transition towards integrated health by providing new ways of delivering services in local communities by local health teams. The emphasis is clearly on digital health. We need efficient and effective digital tools and techniques. Motivated by the Ontario Health Teams’ digital strategy, I have been working on tools to support this transition.

Hephestus is a software tool for ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) for open-source EMR systems such as OSCAR EMR and national datasets such as Discharge Abstract Database (DAD). It is organized into modules to allow code reuse. Hephestus uses SqlAlchemy for database connection and auto-mapping tables to classes and bonobo for managing ETL. Hephaestus aims to support common machine learning workflows such as model building with Apache spark and model deployment using serverless architecture. I am also working on FHIR based standards for ML model deployments.

Hephaestus is a work in progress and any help will be highly appreciated. Hephaestus is an open-source project on GitHub. If you are looking for an open-source project to contribute to Hacktoberfest, consider Hephaestus! 

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OSCAR in a BOX – Virtualized and fault-tolerant OSCAR EMR

Originally published by Bell Eapen at nuchange.ca on August 20, 2019. If you have some feedback, reach out to the author on Twitter,  LinkedIn or  Github.

TL;DROSCAR in a BOX is a fault-tolerant OSCAR instance that you can use out of the box and is virtually maintenance-free!

Image credit DarkoStojanovic @ Pixabay

OSCAR EMR is an open-source Electronic Medical Record (EMR) for the Canadian family physicians. The official OSCAR repository is available here: https://bitbucket.org/oscaremr/

OSCAR is a spring java application deployed in a tomcat container with MySQL database backend. OSCAR project being relatively old, with few users outside Canada, has struggled to keep pace with the developments in the electronic health records domain. However, OSCAR is still useful and popular among family physicians and some public health organizations as it is free and well supported.

Oscar is known for its support for the billing workflow, data collection forms (eForms) and comprehensive patient charts (eCharts). Some of the limitations of OSCAR include lack of scalability beyond a handful of users and limited support for data analytics. Oscar by design is hard to be virtualized as a docker container. Availability of a docker container is crucial for sustainable and fault-tolerant deployment on the cloud and distributed systems such as Kubernetes.

Docker is the world’s leading software container platform, used mostly for DevOps. Docker is also useful for developers to set up a development environment in a few easy steps. I was one of the first few who worked on virtualizing OSCAR. Thanks for all those who forked (and hopefully used) this repository.

I have continued my work on OSCAR docker container and has been successful in creating a (reasonably stable) container. It is now available on docker hub. I am now working on a fault-tolerant deployment of OSCAR in customized hardware. I (and some of my friends who know about and encouraged this project) call it OSCAR in a BOX! It has multiple instances of OSCAR with each instance capable of self-healing when a JAVA process hangs (fairly common for OSCAR). The database is replicated, and both the database and documents incrementally back up to an additional disk.

OSCAR in a BOX is ideal for family physicians who wish to adopt OSCAR but does not have the technical support for maintaining the system. OSCAR in a BOX is plug and play and is virtually maintenance-free. The virtualization workflow will also be useful for existing bigger user groups reeling under the sluggish pace of OSCAR. Please let me know if anybody is interested in collaborating.

BTW, did you check out Drishti?

Originally published by Bell Eapen at nuchange.ca on August 20, 2019. If you have some feedback, reach out to the author on Twitter,  LinkedIn or  Github.