Modernizing Legacy Data: AudBase

Building customer-focused solutions aren’t just buzz words at successful companies – it’s part of the corporate DNA. It starts at the top with strong leadership vision and it multiplies across departments with employees breaking down silos to serve the company and customer missions.

A recent example comes from our client, the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) – one of 27 Institutes and Centers at NIH – where Ravi Kosuri of LCG recently received the Director’s Award for his work on NIDCD’s Audiology project.

NIDCD’s Audiology project was a small part of a very large project the LCG team was working on in 2022.

The larger project had an extensive project management plan with timelines, tasks, and deliverables identified upfront with the customer. An immediate need was identified to provide NIDCD Audiology staff with a way to read and process data from the AudBase system.

The team’s approach was quickly shifted to progressive elaboration by LCG’s project manager, Ashley Stanton. Progressive elaboration is an iterative Agile project management technique that allows for a project plan to evolve as information is gathered. This approach, as well as its short turnaround time, made the AudBase project very unusual from the start.

Even when the pressure was on to rapidly turn the new project, time had to be spent in the early days determining the foundational nature of the challenge. Since the service delivery team was deeply embedded in the project, they worked with customer stakeholders to understand their needs. Multiple technical options and their impact were researched with cost and risk analyses so the team could recommend the path forward. Ravi worked collaboratively with the developer, third-party vendors, and government employees to implement a cloud-based database solution that met NIDCD’s needs on time and under budget.

By conceptualizing the best solution and accomplishing the client’s goals and objectives on the tight timeline, Ravi’s team successfully delivered a:

Web service interface (Azure-hosted API interface with AudBase)
Data transformation engine (JSON parser)
Cloud-based relational database
Accessible interface for third-party applications (such as RedCap, QlikSense, or Power BI)

Not only did Ravi receive the NIH Director’s award but the entire LCG team was recognized by the Center for Information Technology (CIT) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as one of the pioneers in using the NIH Azure Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability (STRIDES) Initiative.

The end result is a new concept and technique for conducting and supporting biomedical and behavioral research and research training in the normal and disordered processes of hearing, balance, smell, taste, voice, speech, and language.

Ravi Kosuri is LCG’s principal architect supporting the life science advancements in biomedical research at NIDCD.