Bringing Social Determinants of Health Into Focus
NIH’s AllofUs project is following the health of one million Americans throughout their lives. A person’s location has an important influence on their health and AllofUs is working to tap into that data via a subsidiary project: the Center for Linkage and Detection, aka CLAD.
Research IT Tackles Geospatial Integration Inside NIH’s Highly Regulated Cloud Environment
Research IT is contributing toward linking these Social Determinants of Health by supporting the testing and implementation of geospatial tools in NIH’s private cloud. The NIH cloud has a number of special restrictions, from database size to security, that each presented unique hurdles to overcome while doing this custom geocoder implementation.
Engineering a Cloud‑Ready Geocoding Pipeline
Delivering this project’s unique needs meant creating our own development environment for building and testing tools before they ever make it into the cloud. The geocoders were specially packaged for the NIH cloud with its own unique operational expectations, constraints that ended up requiring we break one of the geocoder databases into multiple pieces to fit. NIH’s own requirements around maintaining an alert security posture for cloud tools can in certain conditions cause a compulsory rebuild of tools to remediate critical security risks on a very short timeline.
Automation as a Force Multiplier
By not being locked into any one toolset RIT was able to be flexible in meeting the moment by blending a mixture of local and cloud automation so each of the key challenges became not only surmountable but manageable with a minimum of human intervention. Research IT’s usual flavor of automated pipeline is more like delivering a table of clinical data, or exporting a Common Data Model representation of EHR data, but in this case a much more involved container creation pipeline was built incorporating unit tests, security checks and important logging for posterity. At its core the task was still delivering data in support of data science, it was just wrapped in a much fancier package than most folks are normally requesting!
Sustaining Innovation Through Expertise and Adaptability
Research IT Data Services is uniquely positioned to deliver innovations like this geospatial integration effort because of its rare blend of deep technical expertise, domain‑specific understanding, and long‑standing stewardship of complex research data ecosystems. Few teams operate comfortably at the intersection of clinical research workflows, secure cloud engineering, and high‑performance automation pipelines, but this is precisely where Research IT excels. Our ability to design purpose‑built development environments, adapt to stringent security and operational constraints, and craft resilient, automated data delivery pipelines allows us to meet challenges that would stall many other groups. Most importantly, our work is grounded in a mission‑driven commitment to empower researchers, accelerate discovery, and ensure that cutting‑edge tools reach the people who need them most. This combination of technical rigor, adaptability, and service‑oriented collaboration makes Research IT Data Services an indispensable partner for projects that demand both innovation and reliability.
