A few words to introduce yourself?
(Kristal) My name is Kristal JONES. I’m the co-owner and principal researcher at JG Research and Evaluation. We’re a small applied research firm based in Bozeman, Montana, in the US. We focus on providing research skills to the public sector and to non-profits. That includes data management, data analysis, interpretation, and other things like that.
(Kate) I’m Kate SALEMO. I’m the data team lead at JG. The project that we contacted Charles about to help us out with is, basically, building a bunch of different dashboards for healthcare providers in the state of Montana. These dashboards help the providers determine how they are doing with a program called “Integrated Behavioral Health”. It basically just informs them on how well they’re doing with screening patients for any behavioral health issue, anxiety, depression and substance use.
Why did you reach out to Data Champ’ last year?
(Kate) We had already developed this R Shiny app and we knew that we needed to, or we wanted to get it hosted on AWS. We knew it needed to be HIPAA compliant and we wanted to be able to kind of do our own thing and host everything on AWS. We did a lot of googling, and we found your article, Charles, about how to host R Shiny on AWS. And we were like “Well the security isn’t quite there, but I bet this guy knows what he’s doing, so…” We emailed you and from there we figured out whether or not we could make it work. And we did!
(Kristal) I’ll just add, as a small firm we don’t have the ability to have all skillsets on staff. And our data team lead is incredible and also appreciates having colleagues. In some ways, Charles, when we found you, it was wanting to have another colleague and knowing that not all of those people could be on staff all the time with us. We were excited by the opportunity to work together in this kind of in a collaborative way that is kind of project based.
Did you consider other solutions or other companies?
(Kristal) We reached out to R Studio, to look at R Studio Connect - they call it something else now - to use the R Studio server in a few different ways. There were a few different ways that were possible and some of the limitations there, but were we wouldn’t have had as much control and we also weren’t sure that we could meet all of the HIPAA requirements, the protected health information requirements in a lightweight way. We were trying to balance security, I would say, with a kind of complexity of the system in the way it’s being hosted, and that was one of the things about talking with the R Studio team that it felt like it wasn’t quite the right fit for us
(Kate) And I’ll also add that we had been working with another subcontractor on some other projects. We considered him but he didn’t have as much experience in R and R Shiny. And it seemed like, after first meeting with you Charles, that you were going to be not only help us build what we wanted to build, but also willing to teach. And that was those two pieces were extremely important to us. And it wasn’t quite clear whether that was going to be the case with the other subcontractor. And he didn’t. He wasn’t as knowledgeable in the space of the tools that we knew we wanted to use. And you did, so…
How was the collaboration from your point of view? Was it what you expected?
(Kate) I can’t remember what I expected, but it probably went better than I expected I would say. Yeah, it was definitely better than what I expected because I learned so much. I don’t know that I expected you to be so willing to collaborate and teach, spend so much time on all of the little things or all of the random things, and answer all of my nitty gritty questions. Yeah, I think it all went extremely well. We ended up at a place that I never would have imagined. That I didn’t even know was possible maybe at the beginning, just with all of the different pieces of automation. And we ended up using a lot of different tools that I didn’t even know existed. It was all super fun. I’m sure I expected it to be fun, and then I think it ended up being even more fun and also cool than I expected I geeked out over most of it, so…
(Kristal) From my point of view, kind of providing, being in the background a bit and trying to support where I could but not being in the day to day of all the details and all the creative work that you guys were doing, I would say that one thing I really appreciated was your willingness, Charles, to think with us about some of the more innovative solutions and newer opportunities. Both with the AWS architecture and then also some of the security or the ways to put that architecture together maybe.
What’s the next step for you?
(Kate) We are pretty much at a maintenance phase where it’s really just, mostly bug fixing, maybe adding some new features. There’s a different dashboard for every single healthcare provider and we’ll continue to add to that list of dashboards. So we’ll be creating new dashboards and then hopefully at some point, this is in an ideal world, it would be really nice to integrate them all into a single app or dashboard. But that really depends on the providers’ capabilities of getting us the correct data. That would be an ideal world. But at that point, it’s mostly just maintenance and then creating new dashboards, which takes, I don’t know, probably 5 minutes which is amazing. It used to take a really long time and now it’s very simple to write. Make the few changes that are needed for a new provider and then deploying it takes another 5 minutes which I don’t even have to do anything. I just pretty much click a button.
(Kristal) Well and I’ll just add that another next step is that we’re gonna take this knowledge into new projects, and have a much better sense of what it will take for a new project which is really helpful at the outset, to be able to have realistic timelines and budgets and everything. We also are better aware of sort of, maybe how to the different skillsets we could have on staff. So that Kate can focus on the front end development and then we have other people who can click the button once a month when the updates are needed. So kind of being able to, you know, shift the balance of our data team’s time a little bit and then for new projects also we have an example. We have a full track record of having developed and deployed a totally secure web-based app which there is a growing need and interest in, especially in the healthcare sector. And especially where we live, where there’s not a lot of capacity to do those kinds of things. The capacity is built for us and where we’ll take it, we’ll go in a lot different directions.
Is there anything you would like to add?
(Kate) Two things that I have to say are that, I think, the experience has been wonderful and I love working with you Charles. And also I’m excited for any other thing that comes up, that I’m building. I am excited to continue to reach out to you and ask you questions because I think we’ve built a lot of trust in you, and I also just enjoy working with you and learning from you. I learned so much, and I’m so thankful to have a mentor in you.
(Kristal) It’s nice to have another person we can go to that we trust and also sort of another member of our team to be thinking about these things.
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