In healthcare, the catchment area is the area served by a hospital or medical centre. The Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey has one main goal: to help individuals fight cancer. More specific they are targetting cancer with precision medicine, immunotherapy and clinical trials next to providing advanced cancer care to adults and children.

In order to serve patients as best as they can, researchers need as much (quality) data that can serve their purpose.Surveillance, Tracking and Reporting through Informed Data Collection and Engagement (STRIDE) is an interactive data and visualization dashboard. It includes clinical trials enrollment, bio-specimen inventory, tumor registry analytic cases, and catchment area information.

They have approached me to improve the user interface of their dashboard and that’s what I have been doing! Next to this, I have been helping the person that created the initial dashboard with the following concepts.

• DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself); this is basically re-using of code that you already wrote so you don’t have to write this code again and you will end up with less code to maintain.
• Reproducible results. When I tried to run the initial dashboard, it didn’t work since some packages were not imported and it was not clear which version of those packages I should use. I have added renv as dependency management, this will add a file to your project containing all packages and their versions. It’s easy to setup and it’s worth it!
• Interactive charts. The initial charts were made with the package ggplot2. This is a nice package for data visualization and it offers many charts and display options. But, it’s not interactive and that’s what most people want and expect in a dashboard.

See below for some screenshots of this app.