Proficient Health


Case Studies

Proficient Health Creates New Revenue Stream with AllCloud Solution

Proficient Health helps physicians, hospitals, and other healthcare providers eliminate technology and communication barriers. The company’s web-based solutions enable providers to securely share and manage information, improve service and care delivery, reduce costs, speed reimbursement, and get more out of their EHR/EMR investment.

Challenge

Customers have long relied on Proficient Health to illuminate real-time insights into referral and operational trends. When the Proficient Health team was approached by a customer asking for more flexible analytics capabilities on a wider spectrum of data, they realized they had an opportunity to enable additional insights via a new product offering. 

The customer wanted to analyze more attributes and blend data generated by the Proficient Health system with other data sources within their own warehouse. Additionally, while they valued Proficient Health’s existing embedded reports, they wanted the ability to work with data within their own BI tools. To launch a new offering with these capabilities, Proficient Health would need an extended architecture, including warehousing, and a secure way to share data back to the customers.

Solution

Because Proficient Health was working under a time constraint, AllCloud performed a targeted Data Migration Readiness Assessment and quickly gained funding for the PoC. Additionally, AllCloud helped to identify further AWS funding and financial support offerings. To get the project moving efficiently, AllCloud brought in highly experienced SMEs who promptly determined needs and requirements and understood the limitations around project funding.  

AllCloud proposed a Proof of Concept (later followed by a second engagement to operationalize) that would include the following components: identifying a PoC data source (OpenSearch), data extraction (GLUE), connectivity (S3), preparing data (Redshift, ) and securing BI access (VPC Gateway). After the solution was built, AllCloud would conduct thorough QA to verify all components and ensure the data was accurate and accessible. Based on the success of the PoC, multiple data sets would then be loaded into a production Redshift cluster.

The project was conducted in two phases: 

1. Data Lake PoC

The first phase involved building a technical solution to enable Proficient Health’s PoC customer to view provider data in a Power BI dashboard. This phase had two milestone goals. The first focused on configuring the solution and loading data from OpenSearch to S3, ending in Redshift. RBAC was also deployed to support single-tenant data curation in preparation for the second milestone. The next milestone produced an engineered data set supporting a single tenant’s report, QA on the previous data set, and verification of connectivity from Redshift to the Proficient customer CIDR. 

The Proof of Concept included the following components: 

  • Data Loading — Data was extracted from OpenSearch and loaded into S3 for storage and processing. 
  • Redshift Cluster Build and Auto Loader Establishment — A Redshift cluster was built to handle data warehousing and processing, along with an autoloader deployment to enable efficient data transfer from S3 to Redshift. 
  • Connectivity — AllCloud supported connectivity solutions to enable an external customer to connect to the transformed data set via PowerBI Desktop.
  •  Quality Assurance — AllCloud conducted thorough QA to verify data transfer and connectivity, ensuring the data was accurate and accessible. 
  • Team Provisioning — AllCloud brought in a part-time Project Manager, Senior Data Architect, Data Engineer, and a QA Analyst to ensure a successful Proof of Concept. 
  • Enablement — AllCloud provided enablement for both the Proficient Health and external customer teams. 

At completion, Proficient Health’s OpenSearch data was loaded to a newly deployed Redshift cluster via S3 through an automated copy processRedshift Auto Loader, and data was transformed via plain SQL Redshift transformations to support a single engineered dataset. This enabled the external customer’s PowerBI Desktop instance to connect to the data set — limited to connecting only from the customer’s CIDR range in regard to external traffic. 

2. Redshift Operationalization for Single Client Data – Production Redshift Cluster and IAC Build

With the success of the Proof of Concept, AllCloud then began the second phase of the project, which involved getting additional data sets into production. Two milestones were also set for this phase. The first focused on configuring the solution deployed via CDK, data acquisition, QA, and the promotion of one previously built engineered data set to production. The second focused on CI/CD, data transformation, reporting QA, and two additional engineered data sets. 

Similar to the first phase of the project, the second phase included the following components:

  • Data Loading — Data was extracted from OpenSearch and loaded into S3 for storage and processing.
  • Redshift Cluster Build — A Redshift cluster was created to handle data warehousing and processing.
  • Connectivity — AllCloud supported connectivity solutions to enable an external customer to connect to the transformed data set via PowerBI Service.
  • Quality Assurance — AllCloud conducted thorough QA to verify data transfer and connectivity, ensuring the data was accurate and accessible.
  • Team Provisioning — AllCloud provided a part-time Project Manager, Senior Data Architect, Data Engineer, and QA Analyst.
  • Promotion to Production — After the successful completion of UAT, AllCloud promoted jobs to the production environment.

At completion, Proficient Health’s OpenSearch data was loaded to a newly deployed Redshift cluster. Data was transformed via plain SQL Redshift transformations to support three engineered datasets and corresponding enrichment, enabling an external Customer’s PowerBI Service to connect to the data set — limited to connecting only from the customer’s CIDR range in regard to external traffic. The infrastructure was deployed via CDK, and a CI/CD process was put in place to enable promotions to production.

Results

Even with an aggressive timeline of nine weeks, the project was finished on time and on budget. The Proficient Health customer who initiated the development of the new product offering is thrilled with their new capabilities, and Proficient Health is now in a position to go to market with this offering across its customer base, creating a powerful new revenue stream for the company. 

“AllCloud did an outstanding job for us on a Business Intelligence proof of concept and follow-on engagement to do the implementation into production. Our customer came to us with a business problem – to make specific data available in their BI Solution. We engaged AllCloud to find a solution and they greatly exceeded our expectations, delivering the project on time and developing it in a way that fit with our Product Development process.” – Jeff Kramer, CTO and Head of Product at Proficient Health