DrChrono gains deeper customer insights from data accessed with Datacoral's secure CDC and other integrations.

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.