Company
Date Published
Author
Neo4j
Word count
1286
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

Yes, I'm talking about a digital road trip. This summer I will rock the world of healthcare using Neo4j to see how each group of stakeholders connect to each other. The healthcare industry involves a wide range of stakeholders from providers to drug manufacturers to legislators as well as patients, making it one of the most complicated industries in the U.S. The author's journey started with a whiteboard discussion about who plays a role in the industry and how they relate to each other. They drew a graph representing the procedures of a clinical encounter between a patient and a provider on one side and the relationships among different stakeholders on the other. The author is interested in tracking prescription drug abuse history by states, hospitals, and providers, as well as Medicare Part D costs by drugs, providers, and states. To model this data in a graph database, they drew out the general graph of the system, identified essential data related to drugs, manufacturers, providers, and lobbyists, and documented what was available through various public datasets. They then refined their model by answering two questions: whether two tables contain columns with shared values and which columns can be extracted as independent nodes. Finally, they created a graph schema in Neo4j, using the Arrows tool to visualize the data structure, and planned to ETL the data into Neo4j next week. The author has linked their project's GitHub repository for further information.