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Impact

Improved patient outcomes through broader, deeper data ingest, and analysis

Increased processing, throughput, storage, and administrative capabilities

Lower total cost of ownership

Challenges

Analysis limited by legacy system capacity constraints; could only store a few days’ data from bedside monitors

Inability to correlate organization’s asthma research data with 20 years’ air quality data from EPA

Solution

Big data discovery environment on Cloudera supports improved patient care and medical research

Industry

Healthcare

One of the leading pediatric healthcare facilities in the United States knows children are not just small adults. They need specialized diagnosis, treatment, equipment, and support. Most importantly, they require doctors, nurses, and specialists who understand these differences. 

Overview

One of the leading pediatric healthcare facilities in the United States knows children are not just small adults. They need specialized diagnosis, treatment, equipment, and support. Most importantly, they require doctors, nurses, and specialists who understand these differences.

Hospitals' intensive care units (ICUs) have bedside monitors that continuously collect data streams on patient vitals such as respiration, heart rate, and blood pressure. The amount of information is vast, leading healthcare facilities to take hourly snapshots and then discard the data after several days.

This national children's hospital identified two projects that would benefit from longer-term data storage and analysis:

  • Bedside alarm study: The organization wanted to know how environmental factors, such as ambient light and noise, impact the quality of care and patient outcomes of infants in the neonatal ICU; these patients are perhaps the most sensitive to factors of their environment, but least capable of communicating what they’re experiencing. For this level of analysis, the hospital would need to expand the window of data stored from bedside monitors beyond the three days that it had historically been capturing.

  • Asthma research and discovery: Asthma is one of the chief reasons that patients come to the hospital’s emergency rooms and are admitted, so understanding the precursors and potential triggers to asthmatic events is critical. The organization has access to 20 years of air quality data from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), but the task of correlating this with the hospital’s asthma research was beyond the scope of its existing enterprise data warehouse environment.

From start to finish, we were able to produce the output that our research collaborative needed in three weeks.

–BI Manager, National Children’s Hospital

Based on this early success, the organization decided to move its big data platform into production and signed up for a Cloudera Enterprise subscription. The bedside vitals data is ingested into Cloudera and made available for end-user analysis via Apache Hive or Impala, which delivers interactive analysis to healthcare practitioners through its integration with Qlik.

Delivering Value

Improving patient care is always first and foremost in our minds. We are answering the questions that previously were unresolved, and we hope to see improved outcomes because of it.

–BI Manager, National Children’s Hospital

This national children’s hospital has already realized a return on its Cloudera investment. And the organization expects the system to continue adding value through the new insights it delivers, for example, via tools like Cloudera Search.

80% of all healthcare knowledge is contained in patient notes. The ability to extract discreet data elements from those notes is critical. Traditional data warehouse technologies don’t do a great job with that, but implementing Search will enable us to tap into previously inaccessible information

–BI Manager, National Children’s Hospital

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