Helping Healthcare with Apache Kafka and KSQL ft. Ramesh Sringeri

In today’s episode of Streaming Audio, Tim Berglund sits down with Senior Applications Developer of Mobile Solutions Ramesh Sringeri to discuss Apache Kafka®—specifically two Kafka use cases that Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta is working on.

First, they discuss achieving near-real-time streams of data to support meaningful intracranial pressure prediction and managing intracranial pressure (ICP) in a timely manner to help the care team achieve better outcomes with traumatic brain injuries.

Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta is in the process of building machine learning models for predicting ICP values 30 and 60 minutes in the future. This will help the care team better prepare for handling potential adverse conditions, where elevated ICP values could lead to undesirable outcomes. The Children’s team is using Kafka, KSQL, and Kafka Streams programs to build a pipeline in which they can test their machine learning models.

Ramesh also shares about the work they’re doing to mitigate alarm fatigue for care providers. According to him, the current generation of monitoring devices are not equipped to set up multiple alarm conditions, and sometimes a combination of measures need to cross thresholds to be of concern. Children’s is able to leverage stream processing and KSQL to set up multiple conditions, reducing the number of meaningless alarms conditions that might condition care providers to ignore them.

One of the best parts of it all—with Kafka and KSQL, the Children’s team has been able to quickly build data processing pipelines and address business use cases without having to write a lot of code.

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For more, you can check out ksqlDB, the successor to KSQL.

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