Data Transparency with Power BI for National Pet Hospital
The Challenge
Visiting the doctor or a hospital can be stressful for humans and pets alike. Animals entering a completely new environment, being subject to tests and procedures can undergo significant stress. Our client, a major North American Veterinary Healthcare provider with over 1000 hospitals and 6000 staff, take great care and joy in making sure they provide the best experience in their facilities.
Our client has exclusively utilized Microsoft technologies for about a decade for all their Patient Management System applications, backend databases and underlying infrastructure. As their cloud transformation began, it was natural to look towards an Azure platform, which has consistently delivered high performance since its inception.
The client has a strong learn-and-grow culture where regional managers and corporate leadership are always looking to digest qualitative and quantitative information to improve their operations. The challenge has always been to provide the right data, in the right formats with appropriate metrics, at the right time.
The Solution
Microsoft Azure platform in the backend and Microsoft Power BI have been the right combination for iLink to help the client enable their entire field organization to:
- Visualize trends in Customer Experience (CX) scores based on surveys sent and identify areas where a specific region or hospital may be struggling on a Monday
- Implement changes / strategies on the various client experience apps by Tuesday morning, and monitor the impact of the changes made on another Power BI report from the next hour of the implementation
With this coherent data set shared as Power BI reports, all hospital managers, field managers and operations leadership are able to look at the same data & metrics during review meetings or while discussing what metrics should be tracked to measure the increase in client’s satisfaction through the digital tools.
Under the hood, these Power BI reports are powered by data coming through multiple data sources. One of the reports measures mobile app performance and consumes several different data sources:
- User registration data from a NoSQL database.
- User behavior data from Google Analytics.
- Payments data fetched through sFTP from payments processing partners
- API end points from marketing communications partners
- API end points from Survey & customer feedback partners
- Data Lake for Master data
The Outcome
The Power BI implementation for the client has brought significant change across many areas of the organization. For a team who previously sent out companywide updates via excel sheet, which offered no option to view trends over time, the amount of time saved is invaluable. Entire teams are kept in the loop in real-time without sending multiple emails that often were lost or not read.
The ability to visualize data immediately brought about a self-described ‘cultural shift’ within the organization and empowered doctors in hospitals to better diagnose issues or struggles. This meant problems no longer went unnoticed and teams were able to identify areas to improve immediately meaning better customer service for patients and their owners.
Going forward, the client plans to incorporate more data to their dashboards and reporting to continue to provide associates with up-to-date information on their practice management conversion status.
