Programming at GHRI
Group Health's databases capture a variety of data on health care experiences of nearly 600,000 Group Health members. These data are stored on Microsoft Windows Server, UNIX, Sybase, Oracle, and MVS systems. An individual program often pulls data from two or more systems and moves it into the local Windows environment for analysis.
Group Health Research Institute (GHRI) programmers specialize in SAS, Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft Visual Studio.NET. However, as more projects use Web technologies and handheld devices, GHRI increasingly needs Web-based solutions and other programming languages. Recent work draws from the free and open-source software community and includes tools for de-identification of textual data, natural language processing (NLP), and collaborative efforts with research partners on distributed computing networks.
GHRI has a variety of research interests. This diversity allows Institute programmers to work on a single project within one area or on a few projects in more than one area.