Case studies
Froedtert Case Study
Like any invention bred from necessity, Relican developed their solution by solving a critical problem at Froedtert Health in Milwaukee. Each month, between 60 and 70 children with genetic conditions were nominated to be sequenced and diagnosed for a plan of treatment. The challenge arose in that genetic files are notoriously data-intensive, due to the sheer volume of information collected in a sequence. The hospital soon realized that the genetic files were too cumbersome to process using the existing compression and unzipping methods and tools. The ability to simply process existing data was limiting the hospital’s ability to help children. Instead of processing genetic data for the entire group of nominated children, the current technology only allowed five children’s sequences to be analyzed. Clearly, this was a significant and unacceptable limitation.
Froedtert information technology colleagues Andrew Goodwin and Matt Fisher formed Relican to address this important problem by first questioning existing paradigms on analysis methods of large data sets. The team studied the foundation of the data itself and developed a proprietary method to restructure then compress the data to a significantly more manageable size, all without loss.
The revolutionary solution developed by Andrew, Matt and software architect Shonte Amato-Grill, termed Cornerstone, was tested by Froedtert Health with the objective of reducing the size of database audit log files intended for archival while maintaining readability in its reduced state. Cornerstone reduced 1.5 TB of data to 180 GB, which equates to an 88% reduction of its original size without loss. The Froedtert test validated the thesis of the solution, and served as the first successful test of the technology.
