Interdent Inc. is a pioneer oral care organization with over 150 affiliated dental offices. It employs more than 450 dentists in the 8 US states, providing comprehensive dentistry to over one million patients annually, including general, orthodontics, periodontics, endodontics, pedodontics, prosthodontics, and oral surgery.
Interdent uses Legacy mainframe system in its clinics to manage electronic patient data, insurance processing and automate dental clinical management. Each day the data is synced back to the head office.
The reporting was not automated and management had to wait for days to get business reports. The clinics and regional managers had a very limited insight to financial performance and patient satisfaction. Reporting occurred through excel sheets which were prone to error and inconsistency of data.
SOME OF THE IMMEDIATE CHALLENGES
- Limited amount of reporting was available in excel sheets.
- New reports took tremendous effort.
- Reports were not available in real time.
- Inconsistent data was present when importing data from Legacy mainframe system.
- The ETL process was slow and took a lot of time to import the data.
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6
Month
Delivered -
3
Project Manager &
Business Analyst -
3
Developers
Involved
We worked with the customer to understand the challenges and business needs. The customer needed a solution ASAP. It was challenging to address all the concerns and requirements right away. We came up with a phased approach which addressed immediate concerns as well as met long term requirements.
PHASE I
A dashboard application was developed which allowed key management personnel to view critical reports aiding budgetary decisions and performance evaluations quicker than before
PHASE II
Consisted of improving the ETL and Database warehouse. Our team worked closely with the customer’s database team to remodel and redesign the ETL and database warehouse to improve data consistency and import times from the legacy applications.
PHASE III
Consisted of enhancing the Dashboard application with a series of textual and visual reports. It also included extending the reports to all employees in the company including doctors, regional managers, finance and various other stakeholders.
After the implementation of three key phases, the users requested for new reports frequently as well as requested changes in some of the existing periods. Agile methodology was adapted to ensure that we respond to business needs as quickly as needed.
The dashboard was a result of several BI technologies working behind the scene.
- Server: Windows 2008 Server, IIS 6.0
- Core Technologies: Microsoft .Net 4.0, Entity Framework, LinQ
- 3 rd Party: Telerik, Soft Artisans, ExperPDF
- Database: ETL, Data Warehouse, SSIS, MS SQL 2008, SSRS 2008
Today, Interdent has a complete Dashboard and Business Intelligence application which facilitates better decision making, improved business performance, access at every level and many more benefits.
Some of the direct benefits from the deployed solution are as follows –
- Uniform Access to up to-date information across the organization.
- Data available at Clinic, Region and Corporate level
- Ease of use, Self-service reporting
- Enables managers to gain insight to drive improved decision making.
- Supports forecasting and budgetary planning reports
- Helped in customer retention through Patient Feedback Reports
- Increase in Revenue - Better Scheduling and Services Focus
- Data: Easily Accessible, Consistent, Adaptive, Resilient of changes
- Helped find correlations, trends, patterns, and business conditions in data.
- Agile methodology enabling modifying and adding reports quickly & easily.
- Freedom of Format: Web, PDF, Excel, CSV, XML.