How Vibrant Emotional Health Connected Siloed Data Sources and Streamlined Reporting Using R

Vibrant Emotional Health is the mental health not-for-profit behind the US National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, New York City’s NYC Well program, and various other emotional health contact center programs and direct services. We engage in emotionally charged conversations with people experiencing a wide variety of mental health and emotional concerns, our programs vary in scope, in resources, and span several technologies. In addition, our data collection and reporting requirements change dynamically in response to emerging clinical needs and reporting requirements from our sponsors. In short, the data we collect is complex, often unstructured, and stored in a variety of sources. In this context, R Markdown Documents have allowed us to interface directly with multiple databases, Google Sheets, API’s, csv’s, and JSON stores to generate integrated reports. Organizing these reports into R packages with accompanying functions that standardize the calculation of KPI’s and apply consistent themes across analyses has allowed us to improve the clarity and aesthetics of our reporting while reducing manual work that was previously needed to produce these reports. Building on this framework we have developed functions to standardize data connections, create reusable data visualizations, and generate reproducible analyses in response to ad hoc analytic requests. These same functions also facilitate the creation of Shiny dashboards where core visualizations that were previously only available in static reports can be manipulated directly by end users to explore clinical and operational trends. These dashboards also facilitate self service reporting by end users. We present here the framework we have developed for our organization wide and program specific packages, the types of functions and artifacts they include and our plans for future development.