Remedy Health Dashboards

Building a scalable data stack and dashboards to help show the real time value and outcomes of personalized primary care

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Healthcare costs have increased in the U.S. in recent years, while health outcomes have lagged, leaving employers seeking new ways to support employee health affordably. That’s one reason that employer-sponsored direct primary care (DPC) plans have increased 800% since 2017.

DPC providers such as Remedy Health supplement traditional employer health benefits by offering 24/7 access to local physicians. Employees who take advantage of DPC services see lower rates of common ailments such as hypertension or diabetes and are significantly less likely to visit an ER or be hospitalized. For employers and insurers, this translates to a 12.6% lower overall claims cost.

Remedy Health came to Gitwit with a challenge. They needed to improve their reporting to show employers the impact of the care they provided. With dozens of employers and thousands of employees, they’d need a solution to integrate data from multiple platforms and present it in a digestible dashboard focused on the right metrics, styled to their brand.

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Data Stack Development

Before getting started on data visualization, Gitwit’s team had to solve one of the most common challenges in data engineering. Remedy’s data was distributed across several different systems: one for electronic medical records (EMRs), another for managing subscriptions, and another for patient communications.

To power a real time dashboard, we needed to architect a modern data stack to integrate the disparate data sources and join them together. We began by meeting with Remedy’s leadership team to map out the systems and understand how each is used in their business. Then, we met with each vendor to obtain access to APIs and dive into each platform’s data model. Our data engineers got to work building the pipelines needed to extract the required data from each API, transform it to meet our requirements, and store the data in a centralized data warehouse.

Our lean solution leveraged an existing Snowflake database provided by Remedy’s EMR. We also developed ETL pipelines in Fivetran to extract data from third-party APIs and load them into a BigQuery database. For Remedy’s patient communication platform, which didn’t offer an API, we created a well-structured system within Google Sheets to allow for manual entry of data on a monthly cadence.

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Dashboard Design & Build

After some initial discovery and visioning with Remedy’s leadership team, we identified two key reports that would provide the most value to Remedy’s employer sponsors. One would show employee utilization of Remedy’s services – metrics such as appointment volume and use of free benefits such as prescriptions and imaging services. The second would list employees who had completed Personal Health Assessments – a key preventative measure for which participants could earn a reward.

Our next task was to choose a data visualization tool – something HIPAA compliant with granular access control for each employer. While Tableau and Power BI emerged as good solutions, we selected Google’s Looker Studio platform for its simplicity and highly customizable design capabilities.

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UX Research

Before finalizing our dashboard designs, we wanted to get feedback from actual users – the HR administrators who would be using the data in our reports. Our UX research team conducted interviews with users, seeking to understand what decisions the reports would help them make, and what metrics truly mattered most.

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Outcomes

The data provided by our reports has been viewed by dozens of employers, sponsoring care for thousands of patients throughout Oklahoma. Our self-service reporting allows plan administrators and CXOs to view the impacts of Remedy’s care anytime, without waiting for monthly reports. Further, automated email delivery of reports saves crucial hours each month for Remedy’s team, who can instead focus on patient care.