Boston Children’s Hospital Garners the “Difference Maker” Quantie Award!

We’d like to congratulate Kara Sewalk and the team at Boston Children’s Hospital for winning the “Difference Maker” Quantie award for their work on covidnearyou.org. The Quantie Awards are the data industry’s way of recognizing the best and brightest individuals in digital analytics. The Quantie Awards are the most relevant and important award in the digital analytics industry.

Created by epidemiologists, researchers and software developers at Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard and volunteers in the tech industry, COVID Near You uses crowdsourced data to create maps that help citizens and public health professionals identify current and potential hotspots for the COVID-19 pandemic. The site (www.covidnearyou.org) is a sister tool of Flu Near You, which is maintained by Kara and her team at Boston Children’s – and served as a perfect model to follow as COVID Near You was architected.

To help make the impactful data available more broadly through COVID Near You, Kara and her team of researchers at Boston Children’s solidified key partnerships with big data providers AtScale and Tableau. Working with these players, Kara and her team were able to seamlessly provide CovidNearYou.org data to public health partners through a live connection between Tableau and the data, empowering individuals and organizations to make quick, data-based decisions. 

By using AtScale’s Cloud OLAP model and Tableau visualizations, Children’s researchers can extract insights from data to help inform the public and the CDC on the state of COVID-19. Public health officials are able to leverage the self-reported COVID data to develop features for their predictive models, visualize the data in multiple formats and work with recommendations from the CDC to broaden their definitions COVID-like symptoms. 

Since its release, millions of people in North America have reported their data to CovidNearYou.org. In collaboration with AtScale and Tableau, researchers are able to understand the incidents of illness and make determinations about who is receiving medical treatment and care. 

By spearheading this data-driven initiative, Kara is helping to ensure that The Boston Children’s Hospital team can access and provide access to the data needed to make the best decisions possible on the path to the new normal and how the public can best overcome the challenges it’s currently facing.

Photo: https://www.digitalanalyticsassociation.org/quanties 

For more information on Boston Children’s Hospital and covidnearyou.org:

• Go to the covidnearyou.org site
• Read the case study