Henry Ford Health (HFH), based in Detroit, Michigan, is a leading healthcare system renowned for its commitment to innovation in medical research. In partnership with Michigan State University (MSU), HFH bridges the gap between clinical needs and academic expertise across both institutions.

Clinicians at HFH and faculty at MSU face challenges in connecting across disciplines due to fragmented communication channels and a lack of centralized resources. This hinders the potential for interdisciplinary research and limits opportunities for collaboration among clinicians and experts such as engineers and scientists.

Our Research Synergy Vanguard Portal (RSVP) solves this by providing a platform that automatically suggests potential collaborators. Our system analyzes user expertise and interests to recommend ideal partners, fostering interdisciplinary connections that might not occur otherwise.

Our portal integrates data from HFH and MSU and enables researchers and clinicians at both institutions to find research collaborators with a simple and intuitive keyword search.

With our profiles connection page, users manage their own detailed profiles, highlighting their expertise, interests and the resources that they have available. This facilitates direct communication, enabling users to connect, share ideas, and initiate collaborative projects seamlessly.

Our system connects MSU and HFH researchers and clinicians, improving collaboration and reducing time spent searching.

Our portal is built using a ReactJS front end for a dynamic user interface and a Flask back end for application logic. We utilize Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) for natural language processing to enhance search capabilities, and Elasticsearch for efficient search performance.