A Methodology for a Scalable, Collaborative, and Resource-Efficient Platform to Facilitate Healthcare AI Research

Healthcare AI holds the potential to increase patient safety, augment efficiency and improve patient outcomes, yet research is often limited by data access, cohort curation, and tooling for analysis. Collection and translation of electronic health record data, live data, and real-time high resolution device data can be challenging and time-consuming. The development of real-world AI tools requires overcoming challenges in data acquisition, scarce hospital resources and high needs for data governance. These bottlenecks may result in resource-heavy needs and long delays in research and development of AI systems. We present a system and methodology to accelerate data acquisition, dataset development and analysis, and AI model development. We created an interactive platform that relies on a scalable microservice backend. This system can ingest 15,000 patient records per hour, where each record represents thousands of multimodal measurements, text notes, and high resolution data. Collectively, these records can approach a terabyte of data. The system can further perform cohort generation and preliminary dataset analysis in 2-5 minutes. As a result, multiple users can collaborate simultaneously to iterate on datasets and models in real time. We anticipate that this approach will drive real-world AI model development, and, in the long run, meaningfully improve healthcare delivery.