Research Projects

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Our data analytics and other data services our helping improve clinical outcomes research, address health disparities and advancing Meharry’s mission to be a leader in data-driven, health equity-focused research. The following is a growing list of projects that are currently underway.

Heal90

We provided consulting on data curation and data analytics services for Heal90, a 90-day men’s health challenge. The program helps participants reverse or eliminate chronic metabolic health conditions. Educational sessions increase their knowledge of medical and nutritional factors relevant to their health and provide the necessary tools to make significant lifestyle changes.

Creating an analytics prototype to increase access to care for individuals with disabilities

Meharry EDA is working in partnership with Serious Health to create a prototype technology that increases access to care for individuals with disabilities, particularly those who are underserved. The six-month project is funded through a $100,000 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, Phase I grant from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research.

Context
Founded in 2019, Serious Health is an agency that focuses on placing elderly and disabled clients into the personal homes of nurses to care for their daily needs. Those nurses offer patients the same care they would get from a family member, with an up to 3:1 client-to-nurse ratio.
Serious Health seek to improve the process for matching their clients with nurses, and have turned to Meharry EDA for help. They seek to create a foundation for a data-driven approach to match the right patient to the right provider by using both physical and Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) data and predictive analytics.

The Approach
Serious Health will define and collect the key variables that will optimize the match between patient and provider. Meharry EDA will create a data warehouse that will store meaningful data, prepare it for analysis, and run analytics on the data to find predictors that optimize a patient-provider match.

Primary Investigators
Serious Health: Gideon Thomas, CEO and founder, is the primary investigator for Serious Health.
Meharry EDA: Fortune Mhlanga, Ph.D., senior vice president for Enterprise Data and Analytics, and Ashutosh Singhal, Ph.D., chief data officer and associate vice president, clinical data stewardship are co-primary investigators.

Patient-Centered Outcome Research Institute – Clinical Data Research Network

We received a grant from PCORnet to create a large, highly representative national network for conducting health research and clinical outcomes research.

PCORnet® R-1306-04869 (PI: Rothman, Russell)
Rajbir Singh (Site: PI), Ashutosh Singhal (Site Co-I)

CDC: Center for Disease Control and Prevention CDC OT 2103

The CDC-0T21-2103 is a national initiative to address COVID-19 health disparities among populations at high-risk and underserved, including racial and ethnic minority populations and rural communities. Our team is working to increase and improve data collection and reporting for populations experiencing a disproportionate burden of COVID-19 infection, severe illness, and death to guide the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We are building, leveraging, and expanding infrastructure support for COVID-19 prevention and control among populations that are at higher risk and underserved.

Fortune Mhlanga (PD/PI); Ashutosh Singhal (Co-PI)

High performance computing to support genomics research

One of the goals of Meharry Medical College’s vision statement is to be a leader in data-driven, health equity-focused research. The Meharry EDA is responsible for building and managing state-of-the-art, high-performance computing network that provide the storage and processing power to support genomics research and other high throughput research and advanced knowledge in computational biology and data science. The EDA has two projects that involve building supercomputing clusters for the College.

HRSA: Health Resources and Services Administration

Thanks to support from Congressman Cooper, Meharry received $1 million to fund a supercomputer cluster to support student-and faculty-specialized genomics research. Meharry EDA is purchasing the equipment and performing the construction to provide a supercomputer cluster for the school.

The supercomputer cluster will help drive novel analytical approaches, create and support discoveries that will enhance Meharry’s ability to serve underserved populations, and improve the health disparities among minority communities nationwide. These resources are essential for student and faculty research using electronic health records, genomic, mobile health, and other massive health data sources.

Meharry EDA is purchasing the equipment and performing the construction to provide a supercomputer cluster for the school.

NSF-Major Research Instrument grant

Meharry Medical College received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grant to acquire a high-performance computing system to support research and training in computational biology and data science. The system will provide significant computational support for high throughput research and advanced knowledge in computational biology and data science.

When complete the EDA will be managing a high-performance computing network comprised of three supercomputing clusters.

Primary Investigators
Dean Fortune Mhlanga, Ph.D. and Ashutosh Singhal, Ph.D.

Helping RCMI researchers address health disparities

The Meharry RCMI Program in Health Disparities Research addresses health disparities at multiples scales of research: from micro to macro environments. Faculty at the School of Applied Computational Sciences faculty are working with their researchers to understand and address their computing needs.

The EDA is supporting this meaningful collaboration by enabling efforts to create and deliver data sets, platforms, research collaboration and targeted educational modules. We are also helping those RCMI investigators assess and analyze big health sciences data that will enhance the overall productivity of the RCMI program as well as contribute to addressing health disparities.

This work is made possible through a RCMI supplemental grant from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities.

Primary Investigators
Samual Adunyah, Ph.D., chair, Department of Biochemistry and Cancer Biology, principal investigator
Qingguo Wang, Ph.D., professor, computer science and data science, co- principal investigator

Task Force Member
Ashutosh Singhal, Ph.D., chief data officer and associate vice president, clinical data stewardship