MarkLogic Releases the Healthcare Starter Kit v1.0

MarkLogic is focused on dealing with data complexity, and what better place to build a new framework than in healthcare? The MarkLogic Healthcare Starter Kit (“HSK”) is a runnable, starting-point toolkit to integrate, query, validate, master, and deliver healthcare data.

What is the Starter Kit?

The toolkit is a layer on top of MarkLogic’s industry-leading data processing platform, which pairs a NoSQL database with data integration technology. This additional layer includes many specifics that people need to ingest, curate, and distribute claims, member, provider, and other related data. It comprises models, mappings, query techniques, Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) conversion services, and more.

We call the HSK a “starter kit” (or sometimes an “accelerator”) because the goal is not to have a generic product that works in all healthcare contexts, or even for all healthcare payers, but rather to lay the groundwork for anything our customers or partners may need to do so that it works faster, easier, and with higher quality by providing examples and key techniques we know are critical to healthcare data processing and access.

The broad categories of features or content in the HSK include:

• Specific data models (claims, providers, member/patient, and location)
• A general data modeling technique for any data model, illustrated by the four provided models, and which is closely linked to the FHIR specification
• De-identification rules to create de-identified or “limited” data sets
• Data cleansing rules to show how to correct known types of dirty data
• Data mastering rules to identify and merge duplicate or related member records
• Data flows to run all these mappings, cleanup steps, and transforms
• Security policies for PHI data, employee data, and sensitive diagnoses
• Semantic, ontology-based query services using CPT codes and SNOMED
• Data mapping examples to canonicalize data into the provided starter models
• An FHIR data service, and examples for real-time data services generally
• DevOps code and plumbing to wire it all together (the project runs stand alone, but is designed to be altered and extended for different projects)
• Unit tests and other best practice examples

Healthcare Data like a Utility

MarkLogic data hubs generally provide clean, highly-available data in challenging, complex environments. Complex, scattered, siloed, or legacy data goes in (like untreated water in the analogy), and cleaner, faster, more highly-available data comes out. The output forms span real-time, batch export to downstream, text search, SQL, semantic/RDF, and API-based access. Any data format in, and any access form out is our goal.

The Healthcare Starter Kit is particularly geared toward Medicaid Enterprises (MES), but can be used in almost any context. In fact, it is a good sample project to get started with MarkLogic data hubs even if your data is not healthcare-related at all.

A Good Place to Start with MarkLogic

We encourage people to download and tweak the HSK to solve their own data problems. If you are a healthcare payer, our provided “starter” models may be used out of the box, but if you are in manufacturing, finance, media, or some other domain, you’ll still be able to ramp up quickly once you write initial models for your own domain. The techniques will still work.

To make extension and change easier, the HSK includes a “cookbook” that breaks out typical tasks such as adding new data sources or elements, or changing outputs, and gives specific instructions on how to perform each task.

The HSK is runnable OOTB to allow developers to tweak and play, rather than build something from scratch. To be runnable, HSK includes sample data, mappings, and outputs that people will ultimately replace once they have their own data, mappings, and outputs.

As people use and extend the system, please reach out to us and add Github tickets, so we can support you as you adopt it. As a community resource, we are happy to help you get started, and we welcome your contributions back to this open-source project.

Download the HSK on the MarkLogic Healthcare Starter Kit Github page.