CASE STUDY
AQUA Dermatology
The Challenge
As a high-growth, private equity-backed regional dermatology provider, AQUA Dermatology has aggressive expansion goals. As the organization grows through acquisition, the data reporting challenges grow as well. The company’s 80+ practices operate on several different practice management systems, and that has challenged the senior leadership and regional managers to gain efficient access to consolidated data required to run the operation successfully.
“We needed easy access to real-time, data-driven metrics to execute the business effectively,” said CIO Mark Bush. But with three different practice management systems in place across the enterprise, reporting on operational metrics involved setting up and populating spreadsheet models manually—a labor-intensive process that hindered timely decision-making.
“To make informed decisions, report out to our investors, and drive the business, we needed to spend less time consolidating data and more time analyzing and acting on it,” said VP of Finance Tim Bates. That included equipping individual providers with timely patient care data.
It was clear that AQUA needed an improved process to consolidate data consistently from disparate systems and deliver real-time reporting to manage a growing regional operation.
ABOUT OUR CLIENT
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Aqua Dermatology is the Southeast’s largest and most comprehensive full-service skin care provider
- 80+ locations in Florida and Georgia, with over 170 of the region’s top clinicians
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Private equity-backed dermatology services organization on a fast growth track
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“To make informed decisions, report out to our investors, and drive the business, we needed to spend less time consolidating data and more time analyzing and acting on it.“ Tim Bates |
The Solution
To achieve this goal, the company engaged BiaaS Solutions, a provider of healthcare-focused data warehouse solutions. With a decade of experience working for PE-backed healthcare rollups, the BiaaS Solutions team understands their distinct data reporting needs and already had a healthcare-focused data warehouse framework—two key factors in AQUA’s decision.
“In our search we found systems that had good database designs or good technical capabilities, but not both, and none were germane to our business,” Bush said. “BiaaS Solutions delivered all three requirements, with a working model already used for outpatient provider practices. That provided the velocity to move the project forward.”
In the fall of 2021, AQUA contracted to implement HealthBiaaS, a robust back-end data warehouse solution purpose-built for companies operating multiple outpatient provider practices, using Microsoft technologies like SQL to provide easy access and full visibility into consolidated data. HealthBiaaS can extract data from nearly any source a healthcare organization uses, as often as daily, enabling clients like AQUA to develop data dashboards and visualizations using the front-end reporting tools of their choice (like Power BI, Tableau, or Qlik).
For the initial implementation, BiaaS Solutions integrated data from AQUA’s three different practice management systems into HealthBiaaS. The team had created an Athenahealth integration previously, dramatically reducing implementation timelines, while integrations to ModMed and NexTech were built from the ground up and are now able to be redeployed to new customers very quickly.
With the HealthBiaaS data warehouse model in place, AQUA can now develop interactive reports and dashboards that allow users to dynamically click through, apply filters, dive deep, and understand their business metrics more efficiently.
“The database is easy to work with because it’s well designed, well constructed, and follows best practices,” Kathryn Wallace, Senior Data Warehouse Developer, said. “By combining sets of data in a uniform way, it gives us a more complete picture of the business and allows us to break away from each system’s canned reports, so we’re not restricted in how we look at the information.”
AQUA started out using HealthBiaaS to access operational data on appointments, financial transactions, and patient demographics. Down the road, the company plans to integrate many other data types, such as payroll and staffing, budgets, telephone activity, and analytics on paid search and other marketing activities.
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“In our search we found systems that had good database designs or good technical capabilities, but not both, and none were germane to our business. BiaaS Solutions delivered all three requirements, with a working model already used for outpatient provider practices. That provided the velocity to move the project forward.“ Mark Bush |
The Result
HealthBiaaS is now providing a seamless, efficient way for the AQUA management team and field staff to gain a complete picture of how the business is performing across key performance indicators (KPIs).
“As one of the larger dermatology practices in the country, we have a unique set of metrics that we challenge our staff with,” Bush explained. “The data warehouse allows us to look at those metrics daily, by week, by month, and year-over-year, enabling senior executives and field managers to monitor the business and immediately rectify a problem.”
AQUA leveraged HealthBiaaS to roll out several new or enhanced reports that will prove invaluable in driving the business forward. Over time AQUA plans to develop more reports on behalf of all its stakeholders. And as more data types are integrated into HealthBiaaS, the company will have the tools to report on even more KPIs that are vital to running a fast-growing, multi-region healthcare organization.
“Now we’re getting more information at our fingertips to drive the business from an operational perspective,” Bates said. “And by lifting the burden of operational reporting off the finance team, we can spend our time generating insights instead of generating reports.”