Seattle Children’s: saving lives with analytic insights, helping doctors make real-time decisions for patient care

Seattle Children’s consists of the Hospital, Research Institute, and Foundation—with approximately 7,000 total active employees and more than 400,000 patient visits per year.

Seattle Children’s organization is united by a compelling mission: providing hope, care and cures to help every child live the healthiest and most fulfilling life possible.

Challenge

Seattle Children’s wanted to proactively provide analytic insights to help doctors make real-time decisions while treating patients. There are many different types of data, including genomic, microbiome, epigenome, that must be analyzed, and because data is often stored in silos, data sharing can be extremely challenging.

At the same time, in the world of the US$1,000 genome, researchers are inundated with data, and need to distill it and find the connections that lead to brilliant insights and breakthrough technologies.

Solution

To address these challenges, Seattle Children’s partnered with Cloudera to implement a modern data platform that helps gather, analyze, and share focused data sets so scientists and doctors can visualize genomic data faster and more efficiently – and make precise and timely decisions when diagnosing a child in the medical room.

Seattle Children’s also uses BlueData software platform to provide on-demand deployment of containerized environments with Cloudera and other tools for their data science teams—helping them quickly find new patterns and generate predictions using genomics data to accelerate important medical research and improve patient care.

Impact

Because there are so many different variables and aspects when trying to treat a patient, Seattle Children’s has decided to focus initially on the most important aspects and gather the data to be analyzed that would yield better results to ultimately save the life of a child.