Urban/Rural Stratification, Study Designer Fixes, and Abby's Protocol Compiler Takes Shape
A focused day on Parthenon with three distinct threads advancing in parallel: the GIS-backed urban/rural stratification pipeline moved from concept to tested RED-phase scaffolding, the Study Designer received several important bug fixes and UX improvements, and the architectural groundwork for Abby's guided Study Design Compiler workflow was laid out in detail.
GIS-01..GIS-04: Urban/Rural County Stratification (Wave 0 RED Phase)
The most structurally significant work today was completing the Wave 0 RED (Red-Green-Refactor) plan for ticket 19-01 — county-level urban/rural stratification using USDA Urban Influence Codes and related geospatial crosswalk data.
Four formal requirement IDs were declared (GIS-01 through GIS-04), covering the ingestion pipeline, crosswalk logic, DSN guard, and stratification exposure via urban_pct. The RED phase test suite is now fully stubbed:
- pytest infrastructure was wired up alongside a UA (Urban Area) loader, crosswalk resolver, and a DSN guard that prevents accidental writes to non-GIS schemas. This guard is a small but meaningful safety rail — GIS data loads are destructive-by-nature and schema isolation matters.
- Vitest stubs on the frontend mirror the backend test surface so the full stack can be exercised in CI once the GREEN implementations land.
- A
VALIDATION.mdflip marks Wave 0 as in-progress, giving the agentic workers a clear handoff signal. - The
gisschema stubs andurban_pctstratification column are defined in the RED Pest (PHP) layer as well, ensuring the backend ORM side has coverage targets before any real SQL is written.
The UA county pipeline will feed directly into cohort stratification workflows in Parthenon, allowing researchers to slice outcomes by rurality — a dimension that's increasingly central to health equity analyses in OHDSI studies.
Study Designer: Three Bug Fixes and a UX Gap Closed
The Study Designer page received a concentrated round of fixes that unblock real usage:
Protocol import now creates studies correctly. A regression had broken the flow where importing a protocol document should materialize a new study record. This is now fixed — the controller properly chains the protocol parse result into a study creation call rather than dropping it silently.
Anthropic model default corrected to Opus. The Study Designer's cloud-evaluation path was defaulting to the wrong Anthropic model tier. This matters for protocol compiler quality: Opus is the evaluation-grade model intended for structured protocol critique and intent extraction. Sonnet or Haiku would produce materially weaker structured outputs for this use case.
Protocol import surface exposed on the Study Designer page. The import entry point existed in the backend but wasn't wired into the frontend page component. Researchers can now actually trigger a protocol upload from within the designer UI without navigating away or using a hidden API call directly.
These three fixes together restore the Study Designer to a functional end-to-end state for the protocol-upload-to-study flow.
Deployment: PHP-FPM Reload Suppression on Hot Deploys
A quieter but operationally important change: PHP-FPM reloads are now suppressed during hot deploys. Previously, hot deploys would trigger a full FPM reload, causing brief request interruptions and cold pool startup latency. This change keeps worker processes warm across asset-only or config-only deploys, which is the common case in Parthenon's CI/CD cadence.
Installer: v0.3.0-rc1 Release Notes Draft
A draft of the v0.3.0-rc1 release notes was committed to the installer docs. This release candidate surfaces the GIS stratification work, Study Designer improvements, and the Abby integration scaffolding as a coherent milestone. The release notes draft serves as both external communication and an internal checklist — gaps in the notes surface gaps in the implementation.
Architectural Planning: Abby as Study Design Compiler Harness
The devlog for tomorrow's work (2026-04-27-study-design-compiler-abby-medgemma-todo.md) lays out the full architectural vision for Abby's role in the Study Design Compiler. The core model is now clearly articulated:
- Abby is the product-facing assistant and workflow harness — she explains, guides, and surfaces decisions to the user.
- MedGemma 27B on local Ollama is Abby's default inference engine for ordinary chat and lightweight extraction — fully local, no data leaves the instance.
- Claude is the scoped, opt-in evaluator for structured protocol compiler tasks when the cloud-evaluation flag is explicitly enabled.
The Phase 0 work already completed today — renaming stale protocol_upload_claude labels to provider-neutral Abby labels while preserving provider=anthropic in audit records — reflects this architecture. The system stays auditable and provenance-complete without leaking model-specific assumptions into user-facing surfaces.
The primary surfaces for upcoming Abby compiler work are StudyDesignWorkbench.tsx, StudyDesignController.php, and the StudyDesign/* service layer — all of which already received attention today in the bug fix round.
What's Next
- GREEN phase for GIS-01..GIS-04: implement the actual UA loader, crosswalk resolver, and
urban_pctmaterialization to make the RED tests pass. - Abby Phase 1: wire MedGemma 27B as the default Ollama backend for Abby chat within the Study Design Workbench.
- Protocol compiler structured output: define the JSON schema for protocol intent extraction and hook it into the
StudyDesignservice layer. - v0.3.0-rc1 release: finalize the installer release notes and tag the candidate once GIS Wave 0 GREEN is complete.
The urban/rural stratification work in particular is shaping up to be one of the more impactful additions to Parthenon's cohort analysis capabilities — expect it to move quickly once the GREEN implementations start landing.