Supernova Award Category
The Problem
CipherHealth’s main business challenge was with its reporting process. The company’s reports were initially being created manually in Excel, so standard monthly reporting took days. Specific client requests would take weeks or months to resolve since it required a lot of upfront manual work. There was no ability to scale. There was no way to drill down. There was no normalization of data. The words "fact table" were mysterious.
To address these challenges, CipherHealth began using Pentaho Community Edition (CE). However, in 2014, CipherHealth faced a new problem – the company’s database grew in size, their reports/products grew in complexity and their early success led to higher adoption of the suite. The increased demands on the company’s infrastructure became too much for the pure open source version of Pentaho to support. For this reason, CipherHealth decided to invest in Pentaho’s enterprise edition.
The Solution
Identifying the problem was the easy part – CipherHealth had merely outgrown its open source-based reporting platform and needed to upgrade to the enterprise version so it could handle the massive amounts of data it was inputting on a daily basis as well as allow us to scale.
CipherHealth decided to go with Pentaho’s Enterprise Edition, because of its long-standing relationship with Pentaho and experience using the company’s open source version. Pentaho’s open source-based enterprise platform for diverse big data deployments was a natural next step for the healthcare technology company.
Pentaho's engineers immediately set up sessions to guide CipherHealth through the installation process and share a ton of best practices. From there, CipherHealth was able to create integrated dashboards for all of the company’s products and now has about 30 reports with dozens of parameters too allow their user community to view data exactly how they want to see it.
The results
The impact that CipherHealth’s reporting capabilities has had on the company has been tremendous and can be broken down into two primary components:
Accountability – CipherHealth helps hospitals identify and manage a specific challenge for each specific patient. If a patient does not have a follow-up appointment after being discharged from a hospital, CipherHealth’s solution helps the hospital get that patient to a doctor as needed. There is a direct impact.
Research – Some clients are using the technology to take a deeper look at the data to determine a deeper cause/effect outcome (i.e. what kind of patient has this kind of problem? What other kinds of problems do patients like this have?)
To determine success from a social impact, CipherHealth runs internal calculations to estimate the effect it’s solutions have had on the healthcare industry. To date, CipherHealth estimates it has prevented over $1.1B in unnecessary visits to the hospital. That amounts to tens of thousands of people who didn't end up back in the hospital. Overall, the company’s technology and reporting system has been able to save thousands of lives.
Metrics
The competitive advantage that Pentaho has been able to provide CipherHealth is immense. The company is able to share data at a level of accuracy and granularity that is currently unmatched in the industry.
To date, CipherHealth estimates it has prevented over $1.1B in unnecessary visits to the hospital which amounts to 10s of thousands of people who didn't end up back in the hospital. Overall, the company’s technology and reporting system has been able to save thousands of lives.
The Technology
Pentaho Data Integration and Business Analytics
Disruptive Factor
CipherHealth is become one of the largest players to emerge in the Healthcare Technology space in the last five years – in large part due to the company’s strong drill-down, reporting capabilities. A combination of innovative product and fantastic account support from Pentaho has enabled CipherHealth to make a major impact on the healthcare industry and the ongoing effort to better prevent the spread of diseases and save lives.
Shining Moment
Most recently, in June 2015, CipherHealth was ranked as the top-performing patient outreach vendor with score of 94.4 in the KLAS' "Patient Outreach 2016: Driving Outcomes – From no-shows to better health" report. Additionally, over the years, CipherHealth has received a number of awards recognizing the organization’s success.