Welcome to the Healthcare Services Analytics & Decision Science Atlas. This is a directory of open-source tools, packages, and projects for analytics and decision science in healthcare.

This site is in its very early stages - please check back as we continue to develop it.

In time, we hope this can develop into a tool to help showcase the amazing work happening across the analytics and data science communities in healthcare, promoting reuse and collaborative work on the tools we all need.

Contributors

Sammi Rosser 💻 🖋 🎨 🤔 🚇 🚧 👀

Amy Heather 💻 🖋 📖 🎨 🚧

Zella King 🐛

Contributing

Contributions are very welcome!

Getting involved in discussions

Interested in discussing some aspect of the Atlas? Got an opinion on how it should be structured, the sort of thing it should showcase, how it's laid out, or the branding? For these higher-level discussions, head over to the discussions tab of our GitHub.

Raising Issues

Spotted a bug? Got an idea for a potential improvement?

Please head over to our issues page and open a new issue - or see if you can contribute to any of the ones already open.

Contributing a tool, package or project

via GitHub Issues (code-free approach!)

If you wish to submit a tool, package or project but are not confident with GitHub and Quarto (or you just have a simple submission to make), you can submit a GitHub issue via our template: https://github.com/hsma-programme/decision_intelligence_atlas/issues/new/choose

This will collect all the required information and use it to automatically generate a new folder and file in the correct format, raising it as a 'pull request' for inclusion in the atlas. A repository administrator will then review the auto-created file, make any tweaks and fixes required, and let you know when your contribution is live.

Advanced option: contributing a .qmd file

If you wish to have more control over your submission and are comfortable using Quarto, you may wish to take a fork of the repository, make your changes, and then submit a pull request. Your request will be reviewed and merged, with additions or tweaks possible.

You can find a template .qmd file for adding a package, project or tool in the templates/ folder.

Templates for other kinds of content will follow in the future.

Creating a new entry

To create your own entry:

1. Create a folder in packages_projects_tools/ named after your tool. Use only letters, numbers, hyphens(-) or underscores (_); no spaces or other special characters.

   • Note that there are currently a lot of placeholders for various tools/packages/projects that @Bergam0t thinks should be added, which will just contain an empty file called .gitkeep that's used to tell GitHub to make the folder. You are very welcome to submit an entry for one of these! In that case, you just won't need to create a new folder - use the one that's already there.

2. Copy the template .qmd file from the templates/ folder into your tool folder. Rename it to match the folder name, keeping the .qmd extension.

3. Add any additional resources (e.g., images, figs) to your folder. Use relative links in your .qmd file - for example:

   • Good: ![](my_tool_example.png)
   • Bad: ![](C:/my_username/decision_intelligence_atlas/packages_projects_tools/my_tool/my_tool_example.png)
   • Bad: !(my_tool/my_tool_example.png)

4. Complete the YAML header, using the provided comments for guidance.

5. Write a description of the project outside the YAML header in the .qmd file.

6. Choose categories from templates/packages_projects_tools_permitted_categories.csv.

   • If no suitable category exists, add a new one in the YAML header and mention it in your pull request. An admin will review it and decide whether to add it to the list of categories.
   • Additionally, if your entry does not fit under the existing headers on the atlas.hsma.co.uk/packages_tools_projects page, please let us know in your pull request and an admin can look at adding a new section to this page. Please let us know if you have a section heading in mind.

Editing an existing entry

You are also welcome to suggest edits to an existing entry via a pull request. Please look in the folder packages_projects_tools/ for a folder named after the tool you'd like to edit. This will then contain a .qmd file with the same name as the folder - this is where you can make edits to the tags and details.

You can look at the URL to find out the filepath you need to look for.

e.g. The page for Vidigi has the URL https://atlas.hsma.co.uk/packages_projects_tools/vidigi/vidigi.html.

The file you need to edit is packages_projects_tools/vidigi/vidigi.qmd

Additional images or other resources can be placed in the same folder and linked to. Use relative links in your .qmd file - for example:

• Good: ![](my_tool_example.png)
• Bad: ![](C:/my_username/decision_intelligence_atlas/packages_projects_tools/my_tool/my_tool_example.png)
• Bad: !(my_tool/my_tool_example.png)

Previewing your new or edited content

To preview your entry locally, run quarto preview to compile and display website.

The project currently uses Quarto version 1.7.33.

Tip

You do not need to render the site manually other than for the purpose of checking your page renders as expected - rerendering and deployment is handled automatically by GitHub Actions when your pull request is accepted.

Using GitHub Codespaces

If you wish to avoid having to clone the repository to your local machine and set up Quarto, you may like to try editing in GitHub codespaces. All GitHub accounts have a fairly generous free number of minutes available for codespace usage per month.

Take a fork as normal using the fork button on the repository.

Click on <> Code, then go to the Codespaces tab and select Create codespace on main.

It will take a few minutes, but you should then be presented with a web-based version of VSCode with the repository cloned and the appropriate version of Quarto pre-installed. You can then use the built-in GitHub features of the web-based VSCode to commit your changes to your fork and make a pull request when you are ready.

Contributing a technique or graph example

Templates for these types of contributions have not yet been set up - please check back soon!

Alternatively, if you're up for the challenge of creating a template, please do feel free to raise an issue to discuss or create a pull request with your proposal.

Making other suggestions

If you have any other suggestions about the website layout, content, or anything else, please raise an issue on the repository.

Getting recognition

When your pull request is merged, you will be added to the contributors list by the pull request reviewer.

Reviewers: see guidance on allcontributors.org/docs/en/bot/usage

You may also be added for other reasons, like providing valuable input via issues or discussions.