pi.healthcare secure sample registration

For a number of years now we have been assisting pi.Healthcare with exporting medical data from their database systems and helping them produce meaningful analysis, reporting and publications. Exporting data from a database is relatively straight forward nowadays due to the fact that most systems have the ability to export database tables as either utf8 comma separated values (.csv) or javascript object notation (.json). However, a common problem that is encountered concerns the sheer volume of data being exported. Millions of records exported as a .csv file can often exceed the importing capabilities of most - if not all - spreadsheet software applications; the usual tool of choice for further analysis. Microsoft Excel and Apple Numbers spring to mind. To this end we developed a number of applications designed to manage large volumes of data for specific cohorts. We like to think of these applications as Consultancy Tools and to-date we have solutions covering the following:

Our collaboration also has us developing an internal consultancy tool for registering and securing sample data received from medical institutes. Samples are received either digitally over secure SFTP or via a physical hard drive. The pi.registration software registers, verifies and copies received samples directly to a specified server or backup location. An audit of the registered data is logged in the system so that its integrity can always be verified. The audit also prevents duplicate data from being registered on the same system. A pi.management app is also in development; its primary purpose being to receives notifications whenever the server content is updated. It logs information such as the number of samples received, file types, sizes and other attributes. Both apps are designed to run natively on iOS and macOS.

David Delfouneso
15 November 2023