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DrChrono gains deeper customer insights from data accessed with Datacoral's secure CDC and other integrations.
Using Datacoral, DrChrono can make data-driven decisions securely and more efficiently than ever before. Datacoral empowers the healthcare technology company to access a complete picture of its customers for more useful business insights.
Historical syncs
of 2B+ records
4x increase in
tables synced
100% reduction in engineering time
Key Takeways
- DrChrono uses Datacoral’s MySQL change data capture (‘CDC’) connector to efficiently replicate their richest and most valuable data to their data warehouse in a scalable, secure, and robust way without spending any engineering resources.
- The healthcare industry has stringent requirements around data security. Datacoral’s software is built as a set of microservices spun up within the customer VPC. This architecture ensures data never leaves the customer’s environment. Combined with Datacoral’s HIPAA-compliant protocols, DrChrono can handle data securely and comply with regulations.
- Datacoral’s reliability and easy-to-deploy integrations give DrChrono an end-to-end ETL solution that helps data engineers keep their team’s data flowing more efficiently.
- DrChrono uses Datacoral’s complete observability to figure out any data integration problems without wasting time sifting through data tables.
- Datacoral also helps centralize all of DrChrono’s data from services like Salesforce and Zendesk, executing end-to-end ETL with minimal load on the production database and warehouse.
Datacoral provides a secure and robust solution to data management challenges unique to healthcare technology companies
Previously, DrChrono had worked with another SaaS data integration vendor who was unable to meet their ongoing data needs.
In shopping for a new ETL solution, DrChrono was looking for a solution that would meet three fundamental criteria:
- Integrate all of their business data housed within their MySQL production database into their data warehouse, and centralize data from SaaS services like Salesforce, Zendesk, and Delighted without routing their data through a vendor owned warehouse.
- Satisfy the stringent data security requirements that they had as a healthcare technology company.
- Be easy to use and require no engineering effort to set up or operate.
When DrChrono started using their previous vendor to replicate data from their MySQL database to their data warehouse, they were primarily looking to support the marketing team’s analytics needs. The data volumes were small in that scenario, and the data did not contain much sensitive information. However, as more departments like Revenue Cycle Management (‘RCM’) sought analytics support, the data team quickly ran into several problems with their existing solution:
- Not scalable or reliable: The increased data volumes from the data integrated from the production database added more load to DrChrono’s systems. These volumes caused the previous vendor’s platform to run into frequent problems and system downtime. “Their replication logic required running really expensive queries on the production database as well on Amazon Redshift.” Yi says, “Also, their configuration became too complex, but could only be updated using their UI and was not always reliable, which resulted in frequent fixing and reprocessing. The combination of a heavy footprint and frequent reprocessing caused our systems to be overloaded,” he adds. Ultimately, they had to dedicate an engineer full-time to understand the vendor platform and work with it to support the increased use cases.
- Not secure enough: DrChrono knew that CDC could be the solution to their systems problems with replication. However, the previous vendor’s CDC solution required routing production database data outside of their VPC before being written back into their data warehouse. At first, they tried to make nuanced integration choices to reduce the amount of data routed through a third party. But this piece-meal approach proved cumbersome and required frequent consultation with legal. The result was significant delays in producing analytics.
- Not easy to use: DrChrono found their previous SaaS data integration vendor’s platform challenging to use. This left data underexplored and crucial business insights lost. “There was no way to map fields from source to destination other than through their UI, which was a huge bottleneck because that’s the part that always failed at scale,” Yi says. As a result, the data team spent more time maintaining data pipelines than analyzing the data and providing business insights.
Yi says that at the very minimum, DrChrono was looking for a provider who could connect to the company’s production and post-production servers and easily push the data into Amazon Redshift. Datacoral checked off all the boxes, and then some. Another factor in Datacoral’s favor: the depth of technical expertise. “We could tell you guys were nerds, and we liked that,” Yi said.
The Results: DrChrono's data team can now analyze their complete business data, a 4X increase in data volume -- all with zero engineering
With its previous SaaS vendor, DrChrono could only replicate a fraction of tables from their production database for analytics. And of those tables, many times Yi’s team found the data was incomplete. With Datacoral, DrChrono has seen no infrastructure overhead even though the data volume increased by over 4X. Additionally, thanks to Datacoral’s built-in data quality checks, Yi can be confident the data his team analyzes is consistently clean and complete. And, they could achieve all of this while not having to spend any engineering resources. Instead, the data team can focus on producing insights for their business.
Robust and scalable connectors. Datacoral’s serverless CDC Connectors can easily replicate the entire MySQL production database scaling to billions of rows and 100s of millions of changes each month. Also, Datacoral’s Salesforce, Zendesk, and Delighted connectors seamlessly replicate data into Amazon Redshift, providing DrChrono a simple way to centralize all of their data about their customers to get much richer insights.
Secure data handling. Datacoral’s software is entirely deployed within DrChrono’s VPC. So, no data leaves their environment. In transitioning, “we needed to be sure our partner is [HIPAA] compliant and willing to sign a business associate agreement with us,” Yi says. Datacoral’s secure-by-design architecture means that they don’t even have to register as a data sub-processor, thus dramatically reducing the data team’s cognitive load around security.
Good infrastructure citizen. Datacoral’s serverless architecture requires a very light footprint, enabling it to stay and operate as a good citizen within DrChrono’s environment. “Datacoral’s CDC connector reliably replicates data from MySQL to Amazon Redshift while minimizing the load on the database and warehouse,” said Yi. Upon installing Datacoral, DrChrono found the excessive loads on the production database, and Amazon Redshift reduced dramatically.
Reliable data from easy-to-use software. “The data quality has been excellent,” Yi says, adding that Datacoral has been very straightforward to install and use. “The technology has been great and reliable, and we haven’t had any issues concerning implementation,” Yi says. Trust has played a vital factor as well. “We were looking for a partner we could trust more fully with our data and who would enable us to use CDC for some of the data we were pulling in,” Yi says.
Complete observability leads to faster problem-solving and greater transparency. Datacoral’s web application provides full visibility into every step of the data pipeline from the data source to the data warehouse. The data team can pinpoint any issues with a couple of clicks instead of sifting through logs. As a result, Datacoral provides the team an end-to-end view of how the data flows into the warehouse.
Data scientists don’t have to worry about the data pipeline plumbing. There are many other projects that the DrChrono team wants to work on. “My department goals have been to try to anticipate and get ahead of what the needs are,” Yi says. DrChrono now has the data and an easy-to-use data replication tool ready to help them get there.
From data chaos to a future built on reliable and securely integrated data
DrChrono has moved from broken pipelines and unreliable data to a more productive data team, thanks to Datacoral’s robust CDC connectors and other integrations. Datacoral’s secure deployment within their VPC gives them the peace of mind that they are not losing control of any of their data. The data team relies on Datacoral to provide clean, up-to-date data for their analyses and do all of the heavy-lifting around the plumbing. By removing the cognitive overhead of day-to-day pipeline management, Datacoral frees up the DrChrono team to help more departments become more effective by leveraging data.
DrChrono continues to be impressed by Datacoral’s technology and the team’s receptiveness. “It’s pretty typical to get a lot of attention when you’re trying to sign a deal. But it’s not very typical to continue to get that attention after you’ve signed the contract,” Yi said of the ongoing commitment Datacoral has shown to DrChrono. Datacoral’s solutions architects continue to help them discover new ways to make their data even more robust and insightful.
“Datacoral has become our CDC partner who we can fully trust with our data,” Yi says. “We are now able to make better decisions because the data has allowed us to gain a deeper understanding of our customers and their needs.”
Jerry Yi
Director of Data, DrChrono
DrChrono focuses on bringing the medical practice of the future to reality; the company built the first iPad EHR. DrChrono creates the best electronic health record, practice management, medical billing and revenue cycle management experience for physicians and patients; the health platform was built for iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch, and the web. The EHR includes customizable medical forms, e-prescribing, real-time patient eligibility checks, patient portal, and more. The Healthcare Partner Platform Marketplace offers a multitude of apps that a practice can select from to bundle in and a medical API for healthcare app developers. DrChrono has attracted thousands of physicians, over 18+ million patients, 69 million appointments booked, and 11 billion dollars in medical billing processed in the platform.
About DrChrono
DrChrono provides healthcare technology services to physicians and other healthcare providers. These services include the maintenance of electronic health records, telehealth platforms, and billing service solutions. The twelve-year-old company has a central data team that responds to information requests from many internal teams, including revenue cycle management (RCM), customer service, sales, and marketing. Under the guidance of Jerry Yi, Director of Data, DrChrono started to develop their data warehousing strategy in earnest in 2017. DrChrono has its application and business data in its production MySQL database and uses Salesforce and Zendesk for routine business operations. DrChrono uses Datacoral’s CDC connector and other integrations to centralize data into its Amazon Redshift data warehouse, Airflow to combine and model raw data, and Domo to visualize data for business intelligence.
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"We have been able to reduce our sales team’s efforts by more than 15% with Datacoral."
Swing Education is focused on tackling the nation’s substitute teacher shortage by matching top educators with flexible teaching opportunities at local schools. Swing Education recruits, screens, and supports thousands of substitute teachers each year via its easy-to-use, web-based platform. With over 100,000 absences filled to date at more than 1,100 schools, Swing Education is enabling our nation’s schools to improve the educational experience for administrators, staff, and students.
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The Challenge
Swing Education had no formal data infrastructure in place and found themselves unable to obtain actionable information on substitute teacher availability and placement statistics, which made it difficult for their sales team to justify their services to the school districts to whom they sold. Their whole selling cycle was adversely affected and it was difficult to recruit new schools to join their service. They needed the ability to leverage data feeds from multiple sources and simplify access to that data to streamline the sales process. They sought to access data from their production system, built atop the Datomic database and combine that with data from Salesforce, Zendesk and other systems so that they could understand the health of their business, such as what percentage of their substitute teachers are placed in a given month or the ability to identify any patterns with churn.
The Solution
Swing Education was already committed to AWS, as that is where their production data in Datomic ran. Other systems, however, such as Salesforce, Zendesk and Customer.io each ran in separate clouds. They needed to reconsolidate data from these disparate systems, transform it and publish it back into Salesforce and Customer.io without taxing their current staff. AWS and Daracoral were the ideal solution as they were already building out their production systems (Datomic) in AWS, and Datacoral securely installed in their VPC and built data pipelines using only SQL in Amazon Redshift. Datacoral appealed to them because of this AWS focus, and their serverless architecture with its cost-effective pay as you process delivery model allowed them to reduce their overall IT infrastructure costs by 90%.
The Result
After deploying Datacoral, Swing Education is now able to use the Salesforce.com data to track the availability of substitutes and school customers while drawing data from Datomic is helping improve forecasting and pipeline tracking so that both sides of their business – their substitute teachers and their member schools — are growing at the same pace. This helps them avoid hitting issues on either resource supply or school demand. They are able to enhance their customer outreach by publishing audiences to Customer.io, which allows them to communicate with both teachers and schools throughout the entire substitute teacher employment cycle. With Datacoral, managing their metrics and customer outreach has become a worry-free flow. Download the Full Swing Education story,
Asha Visweswaran
Co-Founder and COO, Swing Education
“Datacoral has significantly reduced the time and effort it takes to obtain actionable information from multiple data feeds. With less time spent on data management, our team can focus on growing our business and placing more substitutes in our nation’s public, private, and charter schools.”
About Swing Education
Swing Education connects high-quality substitute teachers with schools in need. We recruit, screen, and support a large group of substitute teachers, and we make it easy for schools to find the right sub at the right time. We believe substitute teachers play an integral role in education; after all, the average student spends six months of their K-12 career with a sub. By investing in substitute teachers (we pay for subs to get the qualifications they need and have helped thousands get in the classroom) and developing technology that enables schools to get coverage quickly, we’re improving the substitute teaching experience for schools, subs, and students.
"To us, Datacoral is like having an expert data engineering team and ELT pipeline for a fraction of the time and cost."
Jyve Software is a gig-economy startup in San Francisco serving the $8 trillion dollar grocery industry. Jyve has built an app in AWS that connects retail brand-certified contractors, called “Jyvers,” to local grocery stores to provide white-labeled restocking services. These Jyvers accept jobs to unload daily deliveries to the grocer and re-stock their shelves and point of sale displays according to instructions provided by brands like PepsiCo, Proctor & Gamble and Colgate Palmolive.
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The Challenge
Jyve needed Datacoral to inform their Jyver recruiting efforts, their locations, availability and efficiency ratings. Prior to Datacoral, Jyve had little visibility into the job performance activities of their contractors, therefore they were unable to inform the brand owners and wholesale distributors about product inventory and sales promotion performance.
The Solution
In mid 2018, their founder and CTO, Sam Purtil installed Datacoral, an AWS-native data infrastructure platform that allowed them to define end-to-end data pipelines using a single environment and requiring only their knowledge of SQL. Datacoral collects data from over 75 data sources and follows AWS best-practices for data integration, Redshift operation, security and serverless deployment. Datacoral installs in the customer’s own AWS account and integrates over two dozen AWS Services including S3, Lambda, Redshift, VPC, Athena, Glue and more. Datacoral goes beyond traditional ETL by including orchestration, change recognition, monitoring, error correction and publishing data to any target system. Because they are able to catch data and schema changes as they are introduced, they then are able to assess the downstream impact of those changes, cleaning and clearing pipeline errors before Jyve even notices.
The Result
After deploying Datacoral, Jyve are now able to recruit new Jyvers in new markets more easily and provide product owners (the brands) inventory visibility within each store, all the way to the shelf placement, which they have never had before. Sam estimates that Datacoral has saved his organization over $250k annually by allowing their data scientist to maximize his time spent in data, and thereby avoiding the need to hire infrastructure specialists.
Sam Purtill
Co-founder & CTO, Jyve
“Datacoral is saving us time, money and headaches by acting as our data pipeline team.”
About Jyve
Jyve changes how people work. Our software & marketplace power smarter, more productive & accountable execution for brands & retailers, when and where it matters most – in the store.
"Datacoral made us smarter and sooner."
Front creates a shared inbox for teams that gathers emails, apps, and teammates together in a single collaborative workspace. Front’s shared inbox platform sits invisibly on top of a regular email client, so customers feel like they’re receiving personal emails instead of ticketed auto-replies. Front can be used to tie in multiple channels, including Twitter, Facebook Messenger, Twilio, and more. Behind the scenes, users can create a full response to their customer across multiple departments.
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The Challenge
Founded in 2013 with a goal to build an easy, efficient way to manage team inboxes Front has experienced exponential growth. Facing a round of Series A financing, Front realized they would need concrete, accurate and up-to-date numbers: daily users, monthly users, and revenue, and growth metrics. They needed to get a better understanding of their data and customer base, quickly. Presented with data located in several places, and the need to operationalize it, Front was forced to perform a lot of manual, non-scaleable data engineering.
The Solution
By harnessing Datcoral’s unique approach to serverless, modular, autoscaling data infrastructure, Front was able to build out an AWS-native, end-to-end data infrastructure that could organize and harness its data efficiently. Front uses Datacoral to collect data from sources inside and outside the organization, organize that data, and then generate dashboards, garner business insights, and perform ad hoc analyses to answer questions around the lifetime value of different customer acquisition channels. Datacoral handles millions of events each day seamlessly integrating with billions of records from the application database (MySQL) and other critical systems such as Salesforce, Stripe, Delighted and Google Analytics and consolidates all them in Amazon Redshift and then onto their operational systems. All of these processes illustrate the power and value of a fully functioning, end-to-end, data pipeline which not only supports ELT best-practices, but also runs as affordable, severless functions, secured within Front’s AWS VPC, orchestrating and managing the flow of data into and out of Redshift even as schema changes and data anomalies threaten the flow.
The Solution
By harnessing Datcoral’s unique approach to serverless, modular, autoscaling data infrastructure, Front was able to build out an AWS-native, end-to-end data infrastructure that could organize and harness its data efficiently. Front uses Datacoral to collect data from sources inside and outside the organization, organize that data, and then generate dashboards, garner business insights, and perform ad hoc analyses to answer questions around the lifetime value of different customer acquisition channels. Datacoral handles millions of events each day seamlessly integrating with billions of records from the application database (MySQL) and other critical systems such as Salesforce, Stripe, Delighted and Google Analytics and consolidates all them in Amazon Redshift and then onto their operational systems. All of these processes illustrate the power and value of a fully functioning, end-to-end, data pipeline which not only supports ELT best-practices, but also runs as affordable, severless functions, secured within Front’s AWS VPC, orchestrating and managing the flow of data into and out of Redshift even as schema changes and data anomalies threaten the flow.
The Result
Today, Front has over 5000 customers using shared inboxes, while Datacoral is making it possible for Front to identify performance issues, increase customer satisfaction, and increase sales. Front uses Datacoral’s AWS-native data infrastructure to rapidly get answers to pressing business questions and obtain a fuller understanding of the entire business, including the numbers required by investors and its board of directors. By using Datacoral as its data engineering arm, Front has avoided expensive investments in hand-built data platforms which has freed headcount to hire more analysts instead. With Datacoral, Front also gains full advantage of AWS-best practices and assurances for affordability, availability, security, scale, performance and regulatory compliance.
Cyril Gantzer
Head of Growth and Analytics, Front
“We use Datacoral everywhere throughout the infrastructure to see patterns and develop strategies as we more fully understand stability and churn. It pretty much informs all of our product roadmap.”
About Front
Front powers the heart of business — the meaningful connections between teams and customers that lead to lasting relationships. Bringing email and apps together in a collaborative customer communication platform, Front drives business impact by scaling the natural conversations that create customers for life. More than 6,000 businesses are using Front today to cultivate personalized customer relationships at scale and transform their work into impact.
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