Project Description
The Smarter Planet Platform for Analysis and Simulation of Health (Splash) is a novel computational framework for integrating independent data, models, and simulations to create comprehensive system models. This supports understanding individual and population health at multiple scales and for multiple purposes.
Health results from complex interactions among many distinct human, environmental, and social systems, such as cultural, educational, political, and economic, as well as policies, practices, organizations, costs, and pricing in industries as diverse as advertising, transportation, agriculture, and others. Interventions and policies aimed at improving population health by affecting one system may have serious and unanticipated consequences in another. Chronic conditions such as obesity have resisted medical, behavioral, and policy interventions that touch a single system. We are not always able to fully think through the interactions among such systems. This is because cross-domain thinking and systems thinking are difficult to do without careful collaboration among experts in different domains to explore complex interdependencies among the operation of the real-world systems. Splash facilitates such cross-domain and systems thinking by supporting collaborations among those with health-related data, models, and problems through an open systems-based platform capable of integrating disparate data, models, and simulations, each representing parts of the broader health system.
The goal of Splash is to facilitate the creation of an interoperating complex composite system model supporting "what-if" analyses by policy makers. Every model is essentially abstracted by a pair of schemas representing, respectively, the format of input data it expects and the format of output data it generates. With such an abstraction at hand, models and data in Splash can be loosely coupled via data exchange. In other words, models and data can be combined together by simply understanding how data can be transformed before it is used by another downstream component model. As a computational platform, Splash supports system-level, model-based collaboration among multiple domain scientists. For science, it aims to raise the collaborative capabilities of experts in biology, medicine, and social sciences working on health-related problems, each using different data, methods, and technologies. For policy, it aims to raise the level of scientific evidence and argument brought to bear on complex health issues, ultimately supporting more effective and less costly health system interventions.
Contact: Paul Maglio
Recent Activites
Splash was presented at:
- ACM SIGMOD panel on Data Management Issues in Health and Medical Informatics in Athens, Greece, on June 16, 2011.
- Frontiers in Service in Columbus, Ohio, on July 2, 2011
- INFORMS Healthcare 2011 in Montreal, Canda, on July 19, 2011
- UCLA's conference on Service Industrialization and the Global Information Economy in Los Angeles, California, on July 29, 2011
Publications
Peter J. Haas, Paul P. Maglio, Patricia G. Selinger, Wang-Chiew Tan: Data is Dead... without What-If Models In Proceedings of Very Large Data Bases Endowment, PVLDB 2011 (in press).
Melissa Cefkin, Susanne M. Glissman, Peter J. Haas, Paul P. Maglio, Patricia Selinger, Wang-Chiew Tan: SPLASH: A Progress Report on Combining Simulations for Better Health Policy. INFORMS Healthcare 2011.
Melissa Cefkin, Cheryl A. Kieliszewski, Paul P. Maglio: When are calories like furniture? Modeling service systems to improve health. Service Research and Innovation Institute Global Conference (SRII), 2011.
Paul P. Maglio, Patty L. Mabry: Agent-Based Models and Systems Science Approaches to Public Health, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 40(3), 392-394.
Melissa Cefkin, Susanne M. Glissman, Peter J. Haas, Leila Jalali, Paul P. Maglio, Patricia Selinger, Wang-Chiew Tan: "SPLASH: A Progress Report on Building a Platform for a 360 Degree View of Health". Proceedings of the 5th INFORMS Workshop on Data Mining and Health Informatics, DM-HI 2010.
Paul P. Maglio, Melissa Cefkin, Peter J. Haas, Patricia Selinger: "Social Factors in Creating an Integrated Capability for Health System Modeling and Simulation". Advances in Social Computing: Third International Conference on Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling, and Prediction, SBP10, 2010.
Other Links
Splash Team Members
From left to right: Patricia G. Selinger, Melissa Cefkin, Paul P. Maglio, Peter. J. Haas, Ronald L. Mak, Wang-Chiew Tan, Susanne Glissman, Cheryl A. Kieliszewski, Yinan Li.
