NeuroBlu Analytics Platform Delivers Flexibility and Data-Driven Insight to Healthcare Stakeholders

Introduction

Behavioral health issues, including mental health disorders and substance abuse, affect over 970 million people worldwide. Unlike other areas of research that collect objective data using biomarkers and lab tests, behavioral health must rely on subjective assessments to evaluate its mental, emotional, and social elements. Holmusk, a company striving to reinvent behavioral health through evidence-based digital solutions, built the NeuroBlu platform, a data analytics solution that connects pharmaceutical data scientists, clinical research teams, and academic researchers with real-world behavioral health data. Choosing Dash Enterprise equipped Holmusk's product development team to deliver value for their customers — including three of the top 20 largest biotech and pharma companies — despite complex challenges.

Challenge

Holmusk data scientists were working to standardize the data from over 1.5 million patients and provide analytics insights to pharmaceutical and clinical research teams. To achieve the vision of transforming this service into a full analytics product, the NeuroBlu product team had to consider several challenges:

• Leveraging existing resources and data scientists' Python skill sets, ensure that the product team — focussed on building a quality, customer-facing platform — could provide first-class analytics within that platform.
• Ensure optimal integration within the team’s niche technology stack by custom-building an entire analytics solution from the ground up, or,
• Alternatively, sacrifice a level of flexibility by finding an embedded analytics solution to integrate with their existing technologies, potentially limiting the product’s capabilities.
• Meet pharma sector requirements for complex, often custom data visualizations that are not possible to produce with traditional BI tools.
• Accommodate diverse customer profiles within the pharmaceutical data science, clinical and academic research spaces. Customers’ skill sets include SAS, SPSS, Excel, and BI tools. A successful solution needed to be accessible for all technical abilities.

Solution

With Dash Enterprise, the NeuroBlu product team found a level of flexibility that enabled them to deliver custom analytics in a single platform across a diverse range of target customers.

• Product developers use the Dash Python framework to quickly create proof-of-concept (POC) data apps in Python — no front-end web team required
• Product developers stay true to design principles by continuing to build on the original POC apps in Python up through deployment and production
• End users access NeuroBlu data apps via the browser, where they can interactively select custom parameters, filter the desired data, and generate insights without any coding required
• Dash Enterprise integrates smoothly with Holmusk's back end data and analytics architecture, which most recently includes adoption of DuckDB and Databricks

Results

Non-coder end users such as academic researchers and clinical managers can now follow patient trajectories and gain visibility into the shape of the evidential data on offer. Holmusk developers achieve faster development, decision-making, and deployment, allowing an increasing amount of data to be made available in the NeuroBlu platform.

• Anonymized, aggregated data on 1.5 million patients, increasing to 10 million by EOY 2023, can now be accessed, explored, and built into cohorts to support new, evidence-based research into behavioral health.
• Increased speed of decision making allows new product ideas to progress from design mockup to data app prototype in two weeks
• 1.5 weeks from prototype to production-grade data app because Dash Enterprise abstracts away deployment tasks, allowing developers to prototype, build, and push an app to development from a familiar Python environment
• Standardized, repeatable, yet customizable data visualizations, such as interactive Sankey diagrams to visualize patient journeys and treatment pathways
• 2x number of features accessible to non-coder end users as compared with Holmusk’s core development tools
• 3x increase in non-coder personas in target segments thanks to NeuroBlu’s interactive cohort filtering tool, which means earlier, more meaningful sales conversations that present clients with tailored product demos