Project Highlights
Tracking health disparities in real time
To be effective, modern dental training must align with the specific needs of diverse and often underserved populations.
The EDA is helping the School of Dentistry identify those needs through data.
We are developing a real-time database to track health disparities across socioeconomic, racial and geographic lines. This resource serves as the foundation for advanced teaching tools, ensuring that School of Dentistry graduates are prepared to identify and address the nation’s critical health gaps.
RCMI addressing health disparities at scale
At Meharry, Research Centers in Minority Institutions (RCMI) investigators are doing critical work to address health inequities. However, maximizing their impact requires advanced data capabilities and specialized analytical support.
The EDA acts as a force multiplier for the RCMI Program.
We provide the essential “big data” ecosystem—including curated data sets, analysis support, and research platforms—that investigators need. This partnership ensures that researchers spend less time wrangling data and more time discovering solutions to health disparities.
Meharry Medical Group health gap analysis
Opening a new clinic is a significant investment. But when you care about improving health care access and outcomes, the stakes are even higher.
The EDA partnered with Meharry Medical Group to identify a location for a clinic that would effectively reduce health gaps by improving access to care in an underserved community.
This analysis required precise, population-level insights.
Our team conducted comprehensive market research and gap analysis. By assessing specific factors affecting clinical access, we provided the data-driven findings Meharry Medical Group needed to select a location that maximizes impact, addresses patient needs and improves service delivery.
Turning paper files into actionable data
For decades, the School of Dentistry has managed the Meharry-Health Careers Opportunities Program (M-HCOP). Through M-HCOP, the school has helped students from disadvantaged backgrounds enter health professions.
However, their data lived in paper files. Tracking progress, identifying trends and preparing federal reports was time-consuming.
The EDA has modernized their operations through comprehensive data support. We digitized their paper files. By providing dedicated analysts, custom dashboards, and data visualization tools, we moved them beyond simple data entry. This partnership allows M-HCOP to meet federal evaluation standards with ease and use real-time insights to continuously improve the program for future students.
Improving care through technical innovation
Serious Health is an agency focused on placing elderly and disabled clients into nurses’ private homes for daily care. To scale effectively and ensure high-quality care, Serious Health needed to move beyond manual pairing to scientifically optimize the compatibility between patient and provider.
Funded by an SBIR Phase I grant, we built the digital engine for a new matching prototype. We developed a data warehouse to ingest critical variables—including physical health data and Social Determinants of Health (SDOH). Using predictive analytics, we identified specific factors that predict a successful placement, creating a data-driven foundation for better patient outcomes.
Meharry website redesign
The Meharry Medical College needed a digital refresh. The outdated web design belied the academic and research prominence at the 150-year-old historically Black academic health science center dedicated to educating physicians, dentists, researchers, and health policy experts.
Beyond aesthetics, technical complications lay behind the scenes. Multiple schools and divisions of the college hosted disparately managed websites that required migration to the main Meharry.edu domain. Additionally, the college needed a new CMS to support a controlled process for future updates.
The EDA web team successfully completed a redesign, unifying these schools and divisions under a single, engaging platform with an improved user experience. Staff across the College now use WordPress to update content on their area’s pages.