Dr. O'Connell's Publications

Shared Software

Michael O'Connell, Ph.D. - President
Peter McKinnis - Director of Engineering
S. Robert Collins - Senior Solution Developer


Michael O'Connell, Ph.D. - President

Michael O'Connell has more than 20 years experience in applied statistics, informatics and software development. He has published many papers on graphical statistics, data mining and pattern recognition including applications in health services, environmental sciences, ecology, agriculture, microbiology, genomics, drug delivery, pharmaceuticals, medical devices and manufacturing. Prior to starting Waratah Corp. he worked for 8 years at Becton Dickinson in statistics and product development, most recently running programs in Communications and Information Technology. In this capacity he led the Becton Dickinson Intranet effort, managing and developing a number of global web applications for a user group of approximately 10,000 Becton Dickinson associates.

Dr. O'Connell has been active in the American Statistical Association throughout the 1990's, particularly in the areas of Computational and Graphical Statistics and Health Services Research; and he is a past-president of the NC ASA Chapter. His 1993 paper with Russ Wolfinger, "Generalized Linear Mixed Models: a Pseudo-likelihood Approach" and its accompanying SAS MACRO GLIMMIX have become standard methodology for the analysis of repeated measures and random effects data with discrete responses in the biostatistics and clinical research community. His 1997 paper, also with Wolfinger, "Spatial Regression Models, Response Surfaces and Process Optimization", was named best paper by the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics and was featured on the cover.

Dr. O'Connell has developed several statistical software packages, including S+DOX, a graphical experimental design and analysis package, marketed by MathSoft; and shareware statistical software solutions for curve fitting and calibration. Michael and the Waratah team provide end-to-end software solutions for on-line data mining and statistical reporting using sophisticated statistical and graphical engines in combination with industrial-strength databases/middleware and streamlined user interfaces.

Dr. O'Connell graduated with B.Sc. at University of Sydney, M.S. in Statistics from University of New South Wales and Ph.D. in Statistics from North Carolina State University. He is also currently Adjunct Professor, Department of Statistics, North Carolina State University, is on the scientific board of MathSoft and is an associate editor of the Journal of Statistical Modelling.
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Peter McKinnis - Director of Engineering

Peter McKinnis, a Microsoft Certified Professional, has over eight years experience designing and developing computing applications. Peter graduated from Yale University in 1991 and then spent four years working with doctors at Duke University Medical Center designing and developing a new point-of-care system for collecting and reporting on cardiovascular procedural data. For most of this time, he was the sole developer for the client application written in Visual C++.

A joint venture was started to commercialize the client-server product and develop web-based clinical data-entry. The resulting system, Crescendo, was installed at 12 hospitals. Crescendo was integrated with other systems using HL7 messaging. Peter wrote a Java server application that listened for HL7 messages from other hospital systems and entered the information into the cardiovascular database. For the web-based clinical data-entry, Peter wrote the Java application that converted the database definitions of the questions, answers, and sections into Active Server Pages and HTML. The web-based clinical system was built on Microsoft IIS, ASP, and SQL Server.

Now with Waratah, Peter is the technical lead, designing and developing data mining and reporting solutions using the latest tools and technologies. Working with Health Hero, Peter has written Java applets and server-side Java Beans for creating graphical representations of data using a third-party graphics library. The Java applets work with data from EJBs contained in BEA's WebLogic. He has worked on the report development and deployment using Actuate's e.Reporting suite for the reporting engine and Apple's WebObjects for the user interface. Peter designed and developed the data export system that uses server-side reports to create an XML stream that is parsed on the client by a Java applet data writer. In addition to having an extensive healthcare solution development experience, Peter has kept current with the latest technologies and provides guidance and technical expertise for the other developers.
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S. Robert Collins - Senior Solution Developer

Robert Collins, a Microsoft Certified Professional, has over fifteen years of experience in clinical data capture, aggregation and analysis and software development with heavy use of SAS, Microsoft development tools, Oracle and other technologies. At Duke University Medical Center, he worked on hardware and software for a digital gamma camera system and was involved in numerous clinical and outcomes studies including a physician's IND for DuPont's Cardiolite and the AHCPR (now AHRQ) Ischemic Heart Disease Patient Outcomes Research Team (IHD PORT). For this last project, he managed and organized the vast amount of Medicare claims data analyzed.

Additional work with Duke's point-of-care cardiovascular data system provided the opportunity for Robert to work for a joint venture between Duke and Summit Medical developing a Web-based clinical data information system which was successfully deployed for clinical trials data collection and the Art Registry for Eli Lilly's ReoPro. Robert was also involved in data warehousing and data interchange initiatives at Summit employing HL7, Informatica and other technologies. Robert remained with Summit Medical through their transition from a medical software company to become Celeris, a contract research organization, providing analytical and data management support during their implementation of Oracle Clinical.

Now with Waratah, Robert applies his clinical data and technology background to develop data interchange, analysis, reporting and presentation solutions helping end-users find and understand the meaningful content in their data. Recent project work has focused on an Internet export application to securely move ASP-hosted relational data to local datastores, requirements collection and design for a Web-hosted clinical research patient diary application, PL/SQL coding and optimization and data management and analysis.
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