[Case Study: Search Technology Integration]

Faculty Experts: Lost and Found

The challenge: As a globally renowned cancer research, teaching, and treatment hospital, this client had a surprising problem. The experts in their employ - faculty members with expertise and credentials that often took each faculty member over a hundred pages to describe - could not keep straight who was researching and becoming more deeply expert in what. It was a startling situation of having so many experts with so many achievements and credentials, that no one could keep the information of "who knows the most, and who knows the latest" straight. This gap could have cost this teaching hospital - an entity highly dependent on research grant dollars for its existence - millions of grant dollars each year since they couldn't reliably produce reports on publications and research. 

In order to avoid losing their grant dollars, their information and internet services team identified technology that could parse out lengthy resumes into content bytes, relate them, and report on them according to the grant requirements. What was missing was an ability to classify, extract, transform, and load (ETL) the information into the new system in such a way that only one (clean) master copy of the content existed, faculty could update their own content at their convenience, and classifications could be maintained as the content repository grew.  

That is where Access Sciences came in. By participating in the early strategy and design phase of the project, Access Sciences contributed to the development of additional significant features in the technology selected.  Access Sciences then engaged with the client to manage the data clean up and the ETL process.  Having worked with the client to establish a classification scheme (aka taxonomy) and metadata requirements, the Access Sciences team ensured that search and retrieval would result in accurate hits by assigning classifications and metadata.  

The outcome: The faculty doctors logged into the new system to find their resume and publication CV - formerly in various formats within Microsoft Word - populated cleanly in the new system, classified according to a meaningful schema, and ready for their latest updates.  The grant management department was able to report according to their agencies' requirements, and the grant dollars that were previously at risk were saved.