How Mechdyne Supports U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) With Data Visualization and Threat Management
Deploying critical resources where they’re needed most.
Mechdyne Embedded Software Services allow organizations to use their internal resources more productively by freeing staff to focus on work that will yield the highest return. But that’s just part of the value that comes from augmenting teams with highly skilled data visualization specialists.
Mechdyne team members shore up client capabilities in areas where they may need bolstering, such as visualization and immersive technology applications. They fill gaps, add expertise, and deliver projects on time. And in many cases, Mechdyne programmers and engineers bring entirely new functionalities to organizations – enabling discovery and removing obstacles to insight and understanding.
Partnering with some of the world’s highest profile government and private organizations – on their highest-stakes projects – Mechdyne provides a wide range of IT, AV and software solutions, including embedded software services in data analytics, data visualization and GIS, complex workflow optimization, generating and managing custom VR/AR content, and in digital design, rendering, and visualization support.
Assisting government in the deployment of critical COVID-related services.
The U.S. government has long relied on Mechdyne to supplement and optimize healthcare workflows in the Department of Health and Human Services, where our outsourced software engineering services team develops programs that collect, modify and organize data from multiple sources in a variety of formats, turning painstaking processes into efficient and product ones. Our clients access reports quickly and focus on what matters most.
Within U.S. Dept HHS, the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR) leads the nation’s medical and public health preparedness for, response to, and recovery from disasters and public health emergencies. ASPR constantly scans the horizon to prepare for whatever emergency may come next, whether natural or manmade.
When COVID-19 hit the U.S. in 2019, Mechdyne’s John Carlee and Shane Mudd, senior geographic information system developers, played a pivotal role in enabling the government to track the pandemic’s path and mobilize resources to mitigate its consequences. Carlee quickly developed several scripts to update live data within the official US Government COVID-19 Common Operating Picture (COP). The COP included many dashboards including cases, deaths, testing results, hospitalizations, and community hotspots. This high visibility project provided important actionable information to senior leadership across HHS and the Federal Government as a whole. Carlee’s ability to pivot in support of the COVID-19 response with high quality automations significantly raised ASPR GIS’s profile within HHS.
John Carlee has worked with ASPR for nearly five years at its Washington, DC headquarters. Beyond their work in automation and custom app development, he and Mechdyne colleague Shane Mudd are also charged with completing on-call duty officer assignments on a regular rotation – critical work both for preparedness and ready response to disasters like hurricanes.
Carlee has also served as HHS development lead for Test-to-Treat facility data feeding the COVID.gov public tool (for which he received the PHS Unit Commendation Award). He enabled full automation of all data processes feeding the U.S. government Common Operation Picture. In addition, he automated the static map production creation and distribution for daily Senior Leadership Briefs, collaborates and coordinates with data providers for integration into HHS mapping products, develops and distributes curated data feeds for USG agencies outside HHS, and coordinates hospital data transition from CDC to HHS as the primary point of contact for GIS.
In the area of hurricane response, Carlee has automated daily response products using NOAA Path and Strength data, served as the ASPR GIS response officer for Hurricane Ida in 2021, and regularly rotates as the on-call duty officer, fulfilling all GIS product requests and coordinating the ASPR GIS incident response.
During his time working for ASPR, Carlee and the GIS team have received the 2023 ESRI Special Achievement in GIS Award, the 2023, 2022, and 2020 ASPR Superior Contribution Award.
Versatile skills, essential services.
Carlee’s engagement with HHS began in 2019 with the installation of a CAVE 2 visualization facility at the O’Neil House Office Building (which houses offices of both the House of Representatives and the Department of Health and Human Services). “From there ASPR shifted utilization toward its ongoing public health and disaster preparedness activities,” Carlee explains. “Recently I’ve been focusing on the COVID-19 Treatments Locator, a public-facing online tool that enables people to track down needed therapeutics, such as Paxlovid. The work we’re doing goes beyond just COVID-related antivirals. We’re evolving it to cover a wide range of respiratory diseases. The idea is to develop a one-stop shop for therapeutics, covering pharmacies, clinics, and all other providers.”
While working on long-term projects such as the Treatment Locator, John is also on call to assist in disaster response. “ASPR ingests lots of different data from the National Weather Service and NOAA, assesses impacts on healthcare facilities and addresses those impacts when they happen,” says Carlee. “Our Threat Matrix module takes in a lot of data and assigns threat levels to the health care facilities in the impacted area. We can send out static and dynamic situational awareness posts to help a wide range of responders and care providers to get ahead of it in terms of patient movement and triage.”
To meet the breadth of his responsibilities, Carlee functions essentially as an ASPR employee – fully integrated into the organizational structure. While a substantial amount of his duties can be carried out remotely, a condition of Mechdyne’s contract is that staff live in the Washington, DC metropolitan area so that they will be available when onsite requirements arise.
“Within ASPR, I work in the Office of Data, Analytics, & Information Advantage,” he explains. “When I joined the department in 2019, much of the most basic data gathering was performed manually and statistics were compiled and updated on a monthly basis.” Subsequently Carlee fully automated many of those tasks to enable daily or real-time updates.
COVID hit just four months after he started. “We were getting flooded with data in all sorts of formats, with no standards for formatting. I wrote a bunch of scripts to ingest that data into geospatial-hosted dynamic formats, and the visualization staff created dashboards off of that information,” says Carlee. “With data being updated daily, the dashboards – what we called the ‘Common Operating Picture’ – were on the big screens in the HHS secretary’s response center. With just a glance, you could get a picture of what the heck was going on.”
As a contract employee who is fully immersed in ASPR operations, Carlee interacts both with full-time government staff and his fellow contractors. “We have monthly meetings with the contract staff to bounce ideas off each other and drill down into the various coding libraries we’re using, but it’s hard to separate us from the rest of the staff.”
Carlee’s value to ASPR has been clearly articulated by management. “Our specialized skills in automation can yield significant advances in productivity, and leadership sees us as ‘force multipliers’.,” he explains.
Saving time, saving lives.
“Some automations, for example, have freed up maybe 8 hours a month for general analysts, much of it by managing requests for information and access to the data systems.” Across 20 autonomous scripts that Carlee has written, he estimates that general contractors have saved 70 hours per week. Carlee alone has also created 10 toolbox apps for analysts to run scripts with dynamic inputs, which frees up their time to do deeper work with fewer distractions and task swapping.
While COVID remains a threat and disasters can occur most anytime, Carlee has been focusing also on looming and growing threats. “Cyber security is a big part of my job. With healthcare firms being attacked by international ransomware operations, all those incidents have to be addressed by our team. We’re the situational awareness facilitator for that.”
One way or another, most everything Carlee does related back to visualization, which involves processing a constant inflow of data. It’s for this reason that he, Mudd, and Mechdyne itself have become so valuable to ASPR’s daily operations. “Perhaps our chief value lies in the amount of time we save,” says Carlee.
The efficiency Mechdyne enables not only helps to manage costs and enable staff to work to their greatest strengths. When pandemics range and disasters strike, saving time means saving lives.