HTRAF and HTSQL: New Open-Source Tools Enabling the Rapid Development of Data-Driven Web Dashboards for Clinical and Research Staff

Background• Clinical and research staff need reporting tools to help them

make informed decisions about recruitment, study enrollment, and clinical diagnosis.

• Data-driven web applications are ideal for this purpose, but the time, cost, and skills required to develop and maintain them put them out of reach for financially-strapped organizations.

• We developed and used two open-source tools, the HyperText Rapid Application Framework (HTRAF) and HyperText Structured Query Language (HTSQL), to rapidly create four custom dashboards for an observational study.

Methods• We gathered initial requirements from four users: Clinician,

Research Assistant, Clinic Coordinator, and Intake Coordinator.• Next, we created mock-ups and solicited two rounds of

feedback before developing the dashboards. • Developers used HTSQL to retrieve data from a relational

database and organized these data into HTML page elements using HTRAF.

• We obtained qualitative feedback from users after they had used the dashboards.

Results• Prototypes were developed in one day, fully functional

dashboards in five days.• Developers were able to modify dashboards within hours.• Feedback from users revealed that they liked the dashboards

and found them easy to use.

Conclusions• HTRAF enabled the low-cost development of custom, user-

friendly dashboards for clinical and research staff in about half the typical time frame.

• This open-source framework can be extended easily to support clinicians, researchers, and administrators involved in anxiety and depressive disorders research.

• Examples include: (1) dashboards to support clinician and patient adherence to evidence-based treatment protocols, and (2) participant enrollment tracking via real-time CONSORT diagrams for clinical trials.

• Current HTRAF development is focused on building a template that will allow analysts to customize the layout of a dashboard screen by adding menus, search boxes, tabs, and tables. All of the templates and objects will reside in a special configuration system built with HTRAF, enabling the rapid creation of custom, data-driven dashboards without the help of a developer.

Frank J. Farach, Owen McGettrick, Oleksiy Golovko, Naralys Sinanis, Leon Rozenblit

What is HTSQL?

HyperText Structured Query Language (HTSQL) is an intuitive, open-source database language that lets researchers query a database from their browser's address bar. Search results can be displayed in multiple formats such as comma-separated values (CSV) or HTML.

What is HTRAF?

HyperText Rapid Application Framework (HTRAF) is an open-source toolkit for embedding the results of HTSQL queries into web pages. It enables analysts to associate web elements such as charts and tables with data sources such as a database. When the web page is opened in a browser, HTRAF uses HTSQL to fetch the data from the database and then displays it on the page in the form of a table, chart, or drop-down list.

More information about HTSQL and HTRAF can be found at http://htsql.org.

Client

1

2

3

4

Screen MockupTab Tab

Prototype

RA Dashboard

FinalDashboard

Protocol

Parent

3344HGH1234ABC

Child

Prometheus

Requirements gathering

Development & Quality Assurance

Acceptance testing

Production

How Dashboards are Built

Client

1

2

3

4

Screen MockupTab Tab

Prototype

RA Dashboard

Finaldashboard

Parent

3344HGH1234ABC

Child

Prometheus

Requirements gathering

Development & quality assurance

Acceptance testing

ProductionProtocol

1

How does HTSQL Work?

You enter an HTSQL URL into a web browser

https://demo.rexdb.com/individual?sex='male'

database server url htsql query

2 The HTSQL server converts the URL into SQL (the language of databases) and submits it to the database

3 The database returns the result set

4 The HTSQL server converts the results into the appropriate format and returns them to the web browser (as HTML, XML, JSON, CSV, or TXT)

5 You've got data!

SELECT "individual"."family", "individual"."code", "individual"."sex", "individual"."birth", "individual"."race", "family"."code"FROM "rexdb"."individual" AS "individual" INNER JOIN "rexdb"."family" AS "family" ON ("individual"."family" = "family"."_id") WHERE ("individual"."sex" = E'male') ORDER BY 1 ASC, 2 ASC LIMIT 10000

database server

Future Directions: Using Templates to Configure Dashboard Screens

Example 1: Research Assistant's Data and Study Requirements Dashboard

Example 2: Study Clinician's Dashboard