Exceeding expectations

The Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG) needed to migrate its CorpView suite of mission-critical applications from legacy Windows 2008 on-premise environments to a modern cloud hosting platform due to security concerns and the need for a standards-based architecture. Eagle, selected for its migration and transformation expertise, modernized the CorpView stack of over 30 applications to Amazon Web Services (AWS) Platform as a Service (PaaS). Eagle completed the migration using DevSecOps principles, processes, and tools. We re-architected portions of the stack to use enterprise-wide microservices. We designed and implemented dashboards to monitor migration activities. The resulting computing platform meets current security and technology standards, is secure, maintainable, and capable of anticipated growth. Through our DevSecOps reengineering, deployment time is reduced from hours or days to minutes, increasing team productivity and decreasing costs.

Eagle was tasked with evaluating the effectiveness of a widely used policy recommending that psychiatric inpatients receive follow-up outpatient care within 30 days of discharge. The purpose of the policy was to reduce readmissions and other adverse outcomes of psychiatric hospitalization. To assess the policy, we created a multi-state, longitudinal data set of serious mental illness inpatient and outpatient care covering a six-year period and compared demographic and clinical variables between patients who received timely outpatient care and those who did not. We found that less than 10% of patients received the recommended outpatient care, while more than 15% of patients were readmitted within six months, with poorer rates in state-operated programs. Moreover, patients with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia were no less likely to be readmitted if they received timely outpatient care, and patients with major depression were more likely to be readmitted if they received timely follow-up care. The results revealed the least benefit of the policy for state-operated programs, which seemed to discharge patients too soon, interfering with realizing any gains from the policy.

SAMHSA sought to analyze data quality profiles between years and states for the Treatment Episode Data Set (TEDS). Eagle developed a data quality dashboard to easily analyze and highlight states’ progress in data collection. The dashboard was built with open-source technologies including Python, JavaScript, Plotly.js, and HTML/CSS. Each state’s data quality profile was customizable by state, year, data set, and admission type. Eagle developed a SAS program to categorize the quality of TEDS data, which allowed state partners to easily understand the level of their state’s data quality. The TEDS Operations team utilized the dashboard quarterly to observe trends in data collection and were able identify the quantity of non-valid responses, and the type of non-validity. These tangible metrics allowed SAMHSA and the Eagle team to advise and guide state representatives to improve the quality of their data.

SAMHSA sought to redesign their online database of U.S. mental health and substance use treatment facilities. Eagle developed a dynamic web application called the Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator (BH-Locator) built on advanced open-source technologies such as ReactJS, GIS, and the PostgreSQL spatial database. We provided a customized, role-based user experience, with daily integration between the BH-Locator and the Inventory of Behavioral Health Services database for enhanced accuracy. We added an Artificial Intelligence (AI) digital assistant with conversational capabilities to help users find the information they need from the Locator easily and anonymously. The BH-Locator provided a comprehensive and privacy-conscious, care-finding resource for millions of U.S. residents needing treatment for mental health or substance use disorders each year.