3 posts tagged with "ux"

Every research platform hits the same inflection point. You build a powerful cohort builder. Researchers love it. They create cohorts for Study 1, Study 2, the rare disease project, the pancreatic cancer corpus. Each study gets its own "All-Cause Death" outcome. Each gets its own "MACE" composite endpoint. Before long, you're staring at 89 cohort definitions in a flat, unsorted list where a meticulous seven-concept-set new-user design sits next to an auto-generated stub with one concept and no generations. A Rett syndrome genotype-stratified trial cohort is sandwiched between a SynPUF cardiometabolic triad and a never-run hypertension bundle. The list is technically complete and practically useless.

Today, Parthenon ships a cohort categorization system that solves this. We audited every cohort definition in the database, identified and consolidated 9 duplicates and orphans, assigned 80 surviving cohorts to 8 clinical domains, computed a quality tier for each one, and rebuilt the Cohort Definitions page with collapsible domain-grouped sections and quality filter pills. Researchers can now browse by clinical domain, filter to study-ready phenotypes, and find what they need in seconds instead of scrolling through a flat table.

This post describes the problem in detail, explains how we analyzed and scored the inventory, walks through the architecture, and shows what the result looks like.

We shipped eight analytical upgrades to the Patient Similarity Engine last week — hierarchical concept similarity, Love plots, distributional divergence, propensity score matching, UMAP projections, temporal DTW, consensus clustering, and similarity network fusion. The engine is now, arguably, more analytically capable than anything in the OHDSI ecosystem for cohort-level comparison.

But the UI was still the original five-tab layout we built in the first sprint. And no amount of analytical horsepower matters if a researcher opens the page, sees five tabs without context, and doesn't understand the order of operations.

Tonight we replaced it entirely.

The Query Assistant received a ground-up redesign today — from a single 1,700-line monolith into a clean tabbed interface with two focused views, a live SQL execution modal with real-time PostgreSQL status feedback, and Solr-powered concept search built into every parameter input. This post walks through the architecture decisions, the UX patterns, and the production hardening that happened in rapid succession.