By Megan Nash
School of Business

In Virginia’s public health system, behavioral health data is both an asset and a liability. It holds the potential to improve care for thousands of people. But it’s also deeply personal, and mishandling it could do tremendous harm.

This past spring, five students in the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Business — Byron Aguirre-Zelaya, Kevin Chavez, Adam Funge, Jaella Lahat and Aryan Venkangari — teamed up with the Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services to take on that tension directly. Their challenge: Design a prototype that could help the agency share sensitive health data with researchers — without compromising anyone’s privacy.

The solution they developed relies on a concept called differential privacy, which adds randomness, or “noise,” to data in a mathematically controlled way. The more noise you add, the harder it is to trace information back to an individual. Add too much, though, and you lose what made the data useful in the first place.

“We’re making sure that we comply with regulations,” Lahat said. “We’re making sure that we’re privatizing the data to a point enough that it’s not identifiable.”

The recent students — save for Chavez, they all graduated this May — developed the prototype in an independent study with Michael McGarry, DBA, professor of information systems at the School of Business. From January to May, they worked in agile sprints, held weekly check-ins with state agency staff and developed their code in a secure Amazon Web Services environment. They used synthetic versions of real-world data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration to test their approach.

Midway through, the project expanded. In addition to building a differential privacy engine, the team also developed a Power BI dashboard, a lightweight user interface and a serverless back-end adapter capable of processing standard health data from formats. The team documented every step so that the agency could pick up where the students left off.

Freeing up data for valuable research

Russell Accashian, chief information officer of the behavioral health department, is a VCU alum who saw the project as beneficial for all participants.

“This was a way of keeping talent in the Richmond area … and being able to provide great opportunities for young adults to launch their careers while really moving the state of Virginia forward from a technology perspective,” he said.

One of the project’s biggest challenges was figuring out how to keep data useful without oversanitizing it. Finding that middle ground meant building a hybrid system: One part of the architecture injected controlled noise into the data; another enabled secure collaboration for researchers.

The team also built tools that let users adjust privacy settings and preview outputs before running full transformations, which gives the agency more flexibility as new uses emerge.

The technical build was only part of the job. Working with a live agency meant the goals could change at any moment.

“We learned to be adaptable,” said Lahat, noting that creating quick mock-ups and iterating feedback helped the team — and its client — stay on track.

The system is designed to comply with federal privacy regulations while still allowing researchers and internal analysts to extract insights. If adopted more broadly, it could help inform policy decisions, guide resource distribution, support statewide research and help identify unmet behavioral health needs.

“Being able to privatize this data allows us to do research for substance use and mental health patients,” Lahat said. “There’s a lot more study that can be done on this data if we’re able to anonymize it … to help people in this state get access to services they need.”

Creating a talent pipeline

At the end of the semester, the students presented their system to the state agency’s leadership. The agency had been involved from the beginning, but this was the first time leaders saw the full system in action. The team walked through how its solution could help analysts explore trends in treatment, service use and access, all without exposing individual identities.

“This experience gave me a taste” of real-world working environments, Aguirre-Zelaya said, “showing how we’d meet every week for scrum meetings and having to deliver what we said we would deliver. And if not, then that’s what stops the process.”

McGarry, who advised the team throughout the semester, said the partnership has helped students apply classroom knowledge in a way that benefits not only their careers but the commonwealth.

“The CIO came to us because he knew what our students could do,” McGarry said. “We just had to respond to the opportunity.”

That opportunity is already expanding. Accashian plans to return in the fall to work with a new student team, a new problem — this time centered on generative artificial intelligence — and the same belief in what collaboration can build.

“This was the mission all along — to create this talent pipeline,” he said. “We do have plenty of ideas … and we intend to engage in the fall and spring of next year.”

And for Accashian, the experience offered something else, too.

“What I learned is there are very smart young adults out there ready to take the torch and be part of something bigger than themselves.”