UW Medicine’s data centers are located in a ten mile radius within the Puget Sound area, and could be impacted by the same disaster. Our project is helping the IT Services Data Center team prepare for a remote DR site to improve information assurance. By applying HIPAA DR guidelines to refine and document backup, monitoring, and data center DR processes; ongoing efforts for process improvement that address continuously evolving technology, and an increasing dependency on IT for quality patient care can be assured. This will result in increased systems availability enabling UW clinicians to provide the best healthcare when it’s needed most.

Open access to scholarly publications nurtures the collaborative nature of impacting research. For biomedical researchers, the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy (NIHPA) also makes it a requirement to ensure continued and future funding of their work. Completed in collaboration with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center’s (FHCRC) Arnold Library, this project aimed to assess the NIHPA compliance of publications from one biomedical research institute in order to understand their past adherence to this policy and provide recommendations towards optimizing the access of future publications. This included the development and population of a publication-tracking database – enabling the analysis of the institute’s past compliance rate and compliance-related services (library interventions) – and a comparison of these local tracking efforts to the new NIH Compliance Monitor tool. Based on this work, recommendations for the future tracking, assessment, and improvement of the FHCRC’s public-access compliance were provided.

At Golder Associates (Golder), Business Information Services (BIS) have a diverse user population of over 9,000 employees and consulting clients located worldwide. BIS provide support in multiple business aspects such as general administration, communication and knowledge management. As a result of the organization’s rapid growth, user experience has become a critical requirement of BIS. In our strategy project, we work with Golder End User Relations Function on mapping methodologies and staffing needs of user experience requirements. We made recommendations on how the areas of user analytics, system usability, and information accessibility can be improved within BIS. Our strategy document informs Golder with up-to-date methodologies through example processes developed on real scenarios. With our strategy document, Golder will be able to build a professional user experience function that effectively connects people and technology.

Among the many online services that provide communication channels for groups, there is a lack of singular services that provide users a way to easily interact with each group in one place. In order to communicate with their respective groups, 25 out of 27 people we surveyed online use four or more services, including email and various social media sites. Coordinating so many different services across multiple groups is tedious, challenging, and often results in important information being overlooked or lost. GroupLoop is a single interface that integrates all of the functions users require to effectively communicate with each of their groups. Users can send private or group messages, access contact information for each group member, upload shared multimedia, add events in a group calendar, and participate in forums. They can even view information for multiple groups at once. Feedback from GroupLoop users who have tested these functions in order to communicate with their groups have found it to be “helpful,” “convenient,” and “a service they would like to use.”

Approximately 17 percent of American adults report some degree of hearing loss. Such hearing problems can lead to frustrations and inconveniences in everyday life while listening to or communicating with others. Our team has created a free mobile application, Hear Rite, which diagnoses hearing impairments and provides an economical alternative to costly hearing aids. The first segment of our application takes the user through a hearing assessment, analyzes the user’s hearing capacity and provides feedback on their results. The second part of our application functions as a hearing aid, filtering out undesired pitches and tones while adjusting sound output using a built-in equalizer. The hearing aid utilizes the hearing test results to provide a custom tailored hearing aid to the user along with presets that cater to general sound environments, such as a private conversation or a large lecture hall. Through a series of user studies, we have shown that Hear Rite could be a cost-free alternative hearing aid for people with simple hearing impairment.

Most healthcare institutes have complicated step-by-step operation procedures to ensure safety and privacy protections. Reporting used in routine tasks for healthcare institutes must be customized to meet urgent needs within these organizations. To meet these needs, our project presented a solution using a high-scalability reporting tool: SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), connecting directly to the UW medical database. With SSRS, complicated data extractions can be handled without end users’ involvement; hundreds of reports can be customized and delivered within few seconds.

There are many interruptive events that can affect a global supply chain, such as political unrest, global economics, labor disruptions, natural disasters, and transportation delays. The speed at which a logistics company such as Expeditors International can respond to these events is critical for maintaining a competitive advantage and providing exceptional customer service. Today, flourishing social media is changing how information is sourced and the velocity at which it is being distributed. Our project is to design a social media network monitoring system to help Expeditors utilize timely, accurate, and relevant information on supply chain interruptions and other events that might pose risks to its logistic operations. With the tool we have designed, Expeditors management can proactively respond to these events and consistently meet service commitments while effectively managing costs and risks.

Websites that provide volunteering and donating opportunities often lack a centralized hub for communicating, displaying, and tracking the progress of service projects.  Most organizations have a way of keeping track of projects internally; however, with underserved communities, there may be a lack of resources to enable the efficient monitoring of project development and to obtain expertise on a project topic.  Imara is a web platform that promotes a social and collaborative atmosphere allowing volunteers, community members, donors and subject matter experts to exchange knowledge and contribute up-to-date information on the progress of projects.  This information allows project members to identify areas that need more resources, funding, expertise, or volunteer effort.  Users who evaluated Imara stated that it delivers a simple, informative, and engaging way to get involved with service projects.