Thrive SPC: Using Dataiku, Snowflake, and Snow Fox Data to Improve Clinical Home Care

The Challenge: Managing Multiple Electronic Medical Record Systems

Thrive SPC is on a mission to provide stellar clinical home care to medically fragile children with the help of innovative technology and in-depth data insights. 

When Thrive SPC acquired two different types of healthcare organizations (nursing home facilities and in-home medical equipment providers), they found themselves with a challenge: the need to manage multiple electronic medical record systems with different data reporting mechanisms. These complex and disparate systems would be impossible to manage individually and manually, so they needed a way to prepare and store data in a reliable and accessible manner. 

Setting Off on a Self-Augmenting Journey With Snow Fox Data 

Mike Hoyt, SVP of Technology and Business Process at Thrive SPC describes the data transformation that has taken place as a “self-augmenting journey” that has evolved as the company has grown organically and via acquisition. Ultimately, Thrive SPC has been able to do two important things to address the aforementioned data challenges.

The first is getting out of competing and confusing spreadsheets, which has transformed the way teams work on data projects in favor of organization and inclusivity. With that baseline in place, the second was the development and deployment of centralized reports to improve business processes, tracking weekly team progress, goals defined by regions, and daily tactical metrics. Thrive SPC better serves children and their families by using the insights from these reports to reach excellence in their patient care and minimize financial concerns caused by things such as staffing and shift hours discrepancies. 

How did Thrive SPC reach the level of excellence that they’ve arrived at today? With the winning combination of:

1. Snow Fox Data, a Dataiku consulting partner focused on the acceleration of clients’ goals through data science solutions. The Snow Fox Data team helped Thrive SPC create an analytics platform that ingests data from their source systems and allows users to build end-to-end data solutions no matter the desired complexity. As a first step, they created a dashboard for two data divisions.
2. Dataiku, which Snow Fox Data introduced as part of the analytics platform, allows Thrive SPC to take independent ownership of their data projects. Thrive SPC easily expands upon the data dashboards that Snow Fox Data crafted by using Dataiku in combination with Power BI.
3. Snowflake, which functions as the data lakehouse in this analytics platform, comes into play once Thrive SPC ingests the data and works through data workflows with Dataiku. For Thrive SPC, Snowflake serves as the processing and storage function that ultimately creates an elastic and scalable place to keep data. Dataiku’s seamless connection with Snowflake allows users to manipulate data in Snowflake without leaving the Dataiku interface. Users can stack formulas, try different recipes, and manipulate the data to cater to specific needs. 

It was for us, the best overall ROI because of the skills that were required to use it. We didn't need a DevOps engineer, or as I mentioned earlier, data scientist and similar skillsets. Mike Hoyt SVP, Technology & Business Process at Thrive SPC

Why Dataiku Works Well for Thrive SPC 

Dataiku makes a big difference for a smaller, young organization like Thrive SPC because there is no need for a huge tech fleet to take advantage of what Dataiku offers. On-staff data scientists are not a requirement to work with Dataiku’s visualization capabilities and collaborative, end-to-end tools. This is a key reason why Thrive SPC has chosen to leverage Dataiku. Team members at Thrive SPC were able to jump right into leveraging advanced analytics without having to wait to onboard others or outsource. Dataiku is now completely engrained into daily business decisions at Thrive SPC, and the increased efficiency of this data-driven approach has created tangible value that is clearly reflected by a 3% margin improvement. 

A little advice from Mike: “If you’re a company that generates a lot of data that is hard to synch up and you haven’t done this yet, then start as soon as you can.”  

Continuing to Thrive at Thrive SPC 

Working with all of these tools together has enabled Thrive SPC to design processes that cater to their specific goals which largely center around clear communication and patient touch points. Going forward, with these platforms fully integrated into their daily processes, many new areas in the data can be explored and the acquisition of new data can be managed effectively. What this all means is that there are still new solutions to be discovered that will ensure high-quality clinical home care, utilizing the best of what technology has to offer in the most effective ways.