Verato accelerates time-to-value With Alteryx

Recognizing the advancement of consumerism in the healthcare market and the need for higher-quality data, patient identity resolution and master person index startup Verato saw a chance to jump at the opportunities that no one had taken in the space yet. With a unique cloud-based solution that uses algorithms, or Referential Matching, to match vendor databases with patient data, Verato solves millions of identity queries every day, helping hospitals match up medical records and patient data with greater accuracy, so that they can provide the proper care to the right patients.

“Our tech and algorithm has a lot of moving parts, so our end goal is to be data-driven in terms of how we make our business decisions and how we make changes to our core products,” states Atul Sharma, head of data analytics and customer services at Verato. “We want to make all of our decisions based on hard evidence and data.”

“We are an emerging technology in the healthcare market and we have a unique product,” says Michelle Blackmer, vice president of marketing at Verato. “Traditional master person index solutions cannot quickly scale to meet today’s healthcare demands, and we are a disrupter on a mission to help healthcare delivery organizations improve the care coordination for and engagement of their patients. Many have tried to copy our solution, but we are years ahead of them.”

“I joined the company in late 2016, and I was onboarded to set up a team of analysts,” Sharma says. “When I started, I quickly found out there was no standard tool in place to analyze patient identity data. The goal was to be able to analyze millions of records quickly and efficiently. Unfortunately, a lot of the work that was being done was in Python scripts, which would not allow us to slice and dice data in an ad-hoc fashion.”

”There are 600 million rows of data per customer we work with, so we needed to be able to process ad-hoc requests on a tight deadline,” says Shikhar Agrawal, identity resolution analyst at Verato. “Having automated workflows to process these data inputs in a timely fashion without having to make too many manual changes was key for us to be successful. Also, we needed a functionality that could connect to our Slack files that our customers fill out, and that could additionally connect to our Mongo database to extract data from there.”

When it came down to selecting a solution to overcome their data barriers, Sharma states having a product that could handle large amounts of data was key. “A lot of other products we were looking at were web-based and weren’t able to handle the vast amount of data we were dealing with. We found Alteryx through a Google search and started with a free trial. Seeing its easy usability and repeatability through automated workflows gave us confidence that we had found our solution.”

“We got executive leadership buy-in early on. It made a lot of sense as they saw how the product could help us scale,” Blackmer adds. “Running our home- grown Python scripts versus Alteryx scripts, Alteryx won no contest.”

Through built-out workflows extracting data from Verato’s data sources, Sharma says that the automation has enabled him and his team to sit back and watch the Platform work. “Because we have customer commitments, we plan workflows in advance with confidence knowing that we’ll get the answers we need to customer questions and patient data with ease and efficiency. With Alteryx in our arsenal, we know we can find the answer to any question.” Agrawal chimes in with his own thought,. “The major benefit is that we don’t have to write long SQL or Python scripts anymore. The drag-and-drop functionality has made it easy to use on a day-to-day basis.”

“What’s stood out to me the most has been leveraging the Alteryx Community and customer support for troubleshooting. Training has been incredible and has enabled our team to move forward with our mission,” Blackmer says. “As a matter of fact, we were ranked #1 in Enterprise Master Patient Index, done from the 2019 Black Book survey, and I believe Alteryx was a huge piece that helped us to get to that point.”

From an ROI perspective, the team has seen some impressive statistics. “Thanks to the Platform’s operational efficiency, we’ve been able to reduce the time in finding answers to customer questions from weeks to now just hours,” Sharma explains. “We sometimes can have up to 10 customer projects going on at one time, and we have confidence that 5 or 6 of our analysts can handle it without issue using Alteryx.”

“Its prevented us from having to hire on at least 5 analysts with SQL knowledge, which has saved us a lot of time and money,” Agrawal adds on.

So what's next? The team at Verato plans to continue helping hospitals match up patient identity data with increased speed and accuracy. “We are going to continue on with our mission. We haven’t taken advantage of all the capabilities of the Platform yet, so eventually, it would be great to automate our projects from end-to-end, so all the work would basically be done by Alteryx,” Sharma says. “We want to be able to present the parameters of our findings up front. We have multiple workflows, and eventually, we’d like to reduce the number of workflows we are using to make things more condensed and organized. We will get there!”

“More and more companies are moving towards adopting Alteryx,” Blackmer states. “With this happening, I am happy to have hands-on experience with Alteryx while working for Verato. One of my colleagues working for a tech consulting firm mentioned that companies have started asking candidates for Alteryx expertise while interviewing them, which further endorses my appreciation for this tool.”

Sharma provides advice on how to take advantage of the Platform functionalities available to them. “Take advantage of the resources in the Community. You can find almost any answer you need in there, as there are a lot of active members who are willing to help you out. From the videos to the forums, everything has been really helpful. I encourage everyone starting out to explore the Community instead of taking it upon themselves to do everything from scratch.”