Caserta is helping Moffitt Cancer Center use data on the front lines of cancer research and treatment. The Moffitt Cancer Center, based in Tampa FL, has one singular mission: to contribute to the prevention and cure of cancer. Opening in 1996, Moffitt Cancer center became an NCI Comprehensive Cancer Center in 2001, and today operates a 200+ bed full-service hospital alongside it’s core research mission. The Moffitt Cancer Center is busy – publishing over 800 publications each year and performing over 300 open treatment trials with approximately 1000 therapeutic accruals. As productive as Moffitt Cancer Center is, it knows there is much more work to be done and also knows that work must be fueled by “weaponizing” the use of technology and data against cancer.
MCC, like most large enterprises, has experienced a tremendous growth in the accumulation of data from a variety of sources including national registry sources, internal patient care systems, multiple billing systems, laboratory results, as well as advanced genomic processing equipment generating enormous volumes of data. But despite an abundance of data sources, MCC has struggled to get the right data in the hands of the researchers who can do the most with it. Seeking a new data and technology strategy, MCC turned to the experts in modern big-data and cloud computing architectures – Caserta.
Storming Through the Challenges
Caserta is the leading provider of transformational cloud computing, data strategy and data architecture solutions in the Healthcare sector. Caserta has guided leading healthcare organizations through a range of technology challenges from data maturity and technology assessments, to building customized cloud and data technology strategic roadmaps, to full-fledged cloud-based high-performance data pipeline architecture implementations and deployments. Founded in 2001 by Joe Caserta, who co-authored “The Data Warehouse ETL Toolkit” with Ralph Kimball, Caserta has established itself as the premier firm enterprises trust to conceptualize and implement the cloud and data strategies designed to maximize value from ever-growing data resources.
In MCC’s case, their situation suffered from a “perfect storm” of tough technology and data challenges. First, MCC has data being produced by a variety of disparate sources from all over the organization: live patient care system (running the hospital), national cancer data registries, lab data, patient survey data, and not to mention the tremendous amount of data produced from modern genomic sequencing equipment. Separately, MCC had to contend with their aging and trouble-prone on-premise infrastructure. And yet another dimension of challenge is properly and safely handling Personal Health Information (PHI), which some regard as the most private information there is.
A Modern and Experienced Perspective
When Caserta first began to work with MCC, one thing became clear – the brilliant researchers on staff at MCC were utterly data starved. Due to a combination of PHI data handling policies, knowledge gaps with the source data, and outdated and overburdened tooling for access and distribution of data, Researchers may submit research requests then wait anywhere from 3 to 6 months to receive a spreadsheet of data for cases related to their research criteria and goals.
Caserta brought a modern and experienced perspective. Caserta started brainstorming with MCC research leaders about what their ideal data analytics scenario would look like. Getting the right data in the right hands would need to be fast, accurate, scalable and above all PHI-safe. (The Google Project Nightingale scandal had recently been exposed and was a looming issue with MCC and the rest of the industry.) Bringing nearly 20 years of real-world data architecture experience, the Caserta team started talking about a future state whereby all data sources were collected to a single consolidated data repository daily, supplemented by a process for peeling offspecialized curated data sets for unique data topic areas and research goals. Additionally, Researcher data requests would be satisfied within days (not months) and Researchers would be given a powerful “sandbox” of tools and resources to perform a previously unthinkable range of analytic capabilities.
Comprehensive Transformational Vision
With MCC excited about a vision that provides them exactly what they need to accelerate their research, now came the hard part – making it all happen. The first problem to get over was MCC’s historical on-premise infrastructure. The new architecture vision would never have a chance with on-premise infrastructure – new equipment would be far too costly and take too long to put in place. A cloud-based approach was clearly the best choice, but MCC had no footprint with any cloud vendor thus far. Caserta began a process of educating MCC IT and research staff on the range of cloud vendors, products, and technologies. Caserta eventually proposed a comprehensive transformational vision for a cloud-based high-performance highly elastic data architecture including a phased detailed implementation roadmap.
Despite being hampered by institutional contracting red tape, MCC and Caserta pushed forward with the ambitious implementation. Initially, Caserta pursued two simultaneous work streams: 1. Start understanding MCC’s source data in detail and begin conceptually reshaping the core data repository; 2. Onboard MCC with a cloud vendor and start integrating network infrastructure. Caserta brought in deep experts both in data architecture and cloud-based infrastructure to handle both work streams. MCC data architecture issues were typical but enormous in scale – disparate data sources, but common topic areas like “patient”, “diagnosis”, and “medication” all needing integration.
Most Ideal Vision for Weaponizing Data
While the complex task of unraveling source data and assembling a new and better organized common repository was underway, the infrastructure team was planning for MCC’s first ever presence in the cloud. Establishing a hierarchical network security model, setting up designed cloud resources, secure network connectivity with on-premise infrastructure, and more. Caserta also had to tackle the challenge of architecting how on-premise data would be transferred reliably to the cloud, collaborating with MCC staff on a simple and sustainable pipeline requiring minimal additional on-premise resources. Drawing on years of data pipeline experience, Caserta designed a modern, scalable, cloud-based data transformation platform that will handle their current and aspirational workloads but also be straightforward enough for existing MCC staff to take over and operate themselves.
Today, not only is the first phase of the vision nearly complete, but with Caserta’s mentorship, MCC’s own staff is leading the way with the remainder of the build-out. MCC is poised to start reaping the rewards of the new platform and supercharging the output of its talented Research teams. Caserta’s leadership in healthcare data analytics has enabled MCC to realize its most ideal vision for weaponizing data in the fight against cancer.
Read Full Magazine The 10 Most Advanced Healthcare Solution Providers Of 2020
