DME supplier adopts Azure cloud for data-driven analytics

Client background

This life sciences organization is a durable medical equipment (DME) supplier at its core, providing individuals with timely access to the devices and supplies (i.e., glucose monitors, pumps, insulin, etc.) necessary to manage their health. This medical device organization is passionate about breaking the industry standard for how their patients receive care, through innovative patient device education and clinical coaching services.

The business challenge

As the organization grew and evolved over the years, their legacy analytics environment no longer supported their current needs and left leaders without transparent, timely and actionable insights to guide decision making. Despite having a multitude of valuable data sources available to them, because of the limitations of their legacy analytics environment and a constrained IT department, many of these were being left unused. Leadership recognized that in order to achieve their goals of providing innovative patient care, they would first need to strengthen their internal capabilities by modernizing their data and analytics platform.

Strategy and solution

In collaboration with the life sciences organization and Baker Tilly’s healthcare team, who lead initial conversations surrounding functional design and industry requirements, Baker Tilly was able to stand up a new cloud analytics platform within the Microsoft Azure ecosystem. Power BI was used to enable the organization to visualize large amounts of data from the Azure Synapse platform that handled sourcing, aggregating and transforming source data. The analytics platform reporting capabilities specifically focused on capturing insight into the organization’s revenue cycle management (RCM) as well as their operations and financial reporting and dashboards.

To compliment the core modernization initiative, Baker Tilly developed an advanced analytics proof-of-concept (POC) to analyze the organization’s success as a supplier in managing their patients diabetic care over time (i.e., measuring their A1C value). This was completed by processing physician work order notes, found as both text in their database and extracted from PDF’s, before analyzing the data in a free text form using Text Analytics for Health.

Additionally, the platform was constructed to help the organization ingest inbound eligibility and claims files from third-party vendors. These files were submitted in a variety of different formats and needed to be converted into the organization’s standard format before being processed downstream use cases. Baker Tilly then worked with the organization to set up an outbound integration to a new third-party vendor that allows them to perform stratification across the eligibility and claims data sets to identify potential new prospective patients that could utilize their services and products.

As a result of this engagement, the medical device organization gained the following:

• New modernized analytics platform provides easy access to accurate, timely and actionable insights, allowing the organization to become a data driven organization
• Establishment and onboarding and of a new technical team that included a new VP of Analytics and an Analytics Center of Excellence (CoE) to maintain and sustain the modernized analytics platform
• Gained insights into data previously unable to be processed due to historical resource and architectural constraints
• Enablement of future scale and growth

As the organization looks into the future, subsequent phases of this engagement are planned to include integration of additional source systems – from payroll systems to additional industry-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) operation systems – which will allow the organization to further utilize their analytics platform by extending the use cases for which insights can drive business decisions.