Thrive SPC: Improving clinical home care through Dataiku, Snowflake, and a unified analytics stack

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.

“If you’re a company that generates a lot of data that is hard to sync up and you haven’t done this yet, then start as soon as you can.”

Thrive SPCMike Hoyt, SVP of Technology and Business Process

The first is getting out of competing and confusing spreadsheets, which has transformed the way Thrive SPC’s 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.

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.

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

By pairing the right partners and technologies in a winning combination. Amplifi, a Dataiku consulting partner focused on the acceleration of clients’ goals through data analytics and AI solutions. The Amplifi 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, Amplifi created a dashboard for two data divisions.

As part of the analytics platform, Dataiku was selected to offer Thrive SPC true ownership of its data projects. Building on the initial dashboards delivered by the Amplifi team, Thrive SPC now iterates and extends insights themselves, leveraging Dataiku in concert with Power BI to answer new questions quickly.

Snowflake served as the data lakehouse in the analytics platform, coming into play once Thrive SPC ingested the data and worked 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. Now, users can stack formulas, try different recipes, and manipulate the data to cater to specific needs.

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 chose to leverage Dataiku.

Employees 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 ingrained 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 of improvement.

“Dataiku 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 data scientist and similar skillsets.”

Thrive SPCMike Hoyt, SVP of Technology and Business Process

Continuing to thrive at Thrive SPC

Working with these tools together has enabled Thrive SPC to design processes that cater to their 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 of their 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.