Symphony Care Network Leverages Alteryx to Track COVID-19 Care Data Across Patient Facilities

Delivering quality care to patients through innovation and technology

With over 40 years of experience caring for patients and their families, Symphony Care Network is one of the most innovative providers of post-acute care in the United States. “While we may no longer be a startup, we approach everything we do with a startup mentality, as we often say ‘try things, fail fast’, says Nathan Patrick Taylor, Chief Information Officer at Symphony Care Network. “We’re a healthcare company first and not a technology company, but we rely on technology to help us create solutions for our patient programs. We take pride in knowing that we’ve helped thousands of people overcome life’s most trying times to realize moments of triumph.”

“2020 was a year of unprecedented challenges, and the entire healthcare sector has had to embrace new technologies and outside-the-box thinking to solve the greatest public health crisis in American history. We have long relied on data to make our jobs easier, but sometimes gathering too much data can be counterproductive as it takes too long to interpret the information and gain insights.”

Turning to available resources to keep track of data and insights with ease

“As we worked to create an effective response to COVID-19, we quickly began to rely on data to guide our actions,” Taylor says. “For example, employees and patients alike were regularly tested for COVID-19 in order to limit the spread of the virus. With each individual tested multiple times, data quickly began to pile up. In addition, we had to quickly generate insights without adding additional resources to the team. With Alteryx in place, we rapidly developed analytical solutions that the clinical team demanded.”

“Data is a valuable resource, but we were overwhelmed. There was no consistent way to track across all 34 facilities which patients and employees had been exposed to COVID or who had received care, as we were tracking everything in messy Excel spreadsheets. There is a cornucopia of data platforms out there, but we turned to Alteryx for analytics solutions that made the data we gathered more accessible. Very quickly, we were impressed at how quickly we were able to gain insights and move out of Excel entirely. With our teams operating more efficiently, they were able to focus on delivering value to patients.”

Realizing benefits and ROI at scale

“The ability to rely on advanced analytics solutions to interpret the available data saved our employees countless hours in manual effort, but it goes deeper than that,” Taylor says. “If it weren’t for analytics, it would have been one of the key reasons Symphony would not have been able to remain operational. It would have taken so much effort to parse the data we were receiving that we would not have been able to keep up with changes in real time. We simply didn’t have the budget to hire the team of data experts that we would have had to onboard in order to make sense of all the information we had at our disposal.”

“We set a high standard for ourselves, and Alteryx made it possible for us to continue operating through the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve estimated that we’ve saved $1.3 million in cost-savings through automating our data gathering process and gained an 800% increase in productivity. Additionally, we’ve had over 35 new users across different teams like accounting and HR adopt the Alteryx Platform, giving them the ability to create their own custom reports without having to come to us every time they need something.”

Tackling the future with data and analytics

As the needs of patients change over time, Taylor says Symphony will continue to take advantage of data and analytics to guide them. “We’ve thought of our data as being available for internal or federal government usage only, but we want to start making our data externally available for our research partners to be able to extract, so they don’t have to come to us every month looking for information,” Taylor says. “We’re also finding ways to get better usage out of our analytic apps across departments.”