Unifying your data for resilience to a changing world

Digital Transformation is about understanding your industry, thinking about the future of your company, and owning your path as a digital company. Consolidating your data across the geographical diversity of your offices, workforce, and disparate data management platforms can be critical in your digital transformation journey.

We talked to BrightSpring Health Services, one of the leading providers of complementary pharmacy and home and community-based healthcare in the U.S., about their path to unifying their data and how it helped them be resilient to a changing world. BrightSpring has offices and clinics in 50 states and supports more than 50,000 employees, providing community health services and medication management for over 350,000 patients daily.

Transforming your data platform for a unified view

BrightSpring wanted to migrate to a new, unified data platform that could support a diverse workforce, a complex patient population, and important research goals. With the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, that need only became more pronounced.

“Our digital transformation journey was to solve for that diversity,” said Wes Cronkite, vice president of innovation at BrightSpring. “We knew pretty early on that we had to get our data in one place. This was a goal prior to COVID-19, but having that system and platform helped us be much more prepared and resilient during the pandemic.”

This need for a uniform data system stretched across the organization, from care to logistics to research. William Mills, senior vice president of medical affairs at BrightSpring, emphasized that having data available was part of a larger two-year mission to measure and track critical organizational outcomes that could support high-quality patient care and business growth across the entire BrightSpring system.

With the onset of COVID-19, Bright Spring’s new data infrastructure gave them a head start in building resilience in the face of the pandemic. This positioning was tremendous for a company whose primary patient population and essential workforce were among the most vulnerable in the earliest days of the pandemic.

BrightSpring chose Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Power Platform  for the combination of simple, streamlined data migration, user-friendly applications, and compliant technology gave their team all the tools they needed to move rapidly and comprehensively on their data mission. Azure Data Factory was also integral to managing their data integration with their new Microsoft Azure Data Lake.

“Over the last two years, we’ve been focused on attempting to better describe our outcomes,” said Mills. “We’ve been using the Power BI platform to harness the data from our locations into a data lake to visualize data to help us better articulate our outcomes and value propositions. It’s also resulted in several peer-reviewed publications due to these outcomes.”

With their new set of data features, leadership and IT staff at BrightSpring were able to develop advanced solutions to help their workforce focus even more on caring for their patient population safely and responsibly in the face of a pandemic.

Seamless and intuitive integration within weeks

With their digital transformation starting before the COVID-19 pandemic, BrightSpring was able to stand up and deploy an app using Power Apps, to track, triage, and monitor COVID-19 cases in their patients and workforce in two weeks.

“We’ve been able to visualize and track cases and measure our rate regularly and keep our COVID-19 prevalence rate consistently at less than half of the national average,” said Mills. “Even now, that application has been adapted to help us trace COVID-19 vaccinations in our system.”

The solutions built and leveraged by BrightSpring were driven by its inherent low-code or no-code setup. BrightSpring Chief Clinical Officer Susan Sender said one of the major successes of the platform is that it’s intuitive and doesn’t require extensive training or technical expertise. “Power Platform is easy enough that even I can use it, and that’s saying something,” said Sender. “It didn’t require an army of trainers to march across the country to get us up to speed. There have been very few resources expended on Power Platform training.”

This kind of seamless integration was incredibly beneficial for BrightSpring generally. More important, this enabled BrightSpring to quickly respond to the challenges of COVID-19.

Continued transformation and innovation

When it comes to using additional features, Cronkite says that they are “just getting started.” Sender points to the development of advanced audit tools for in-home and in-office care. With their new platform, they can take what can be quite difficult due to interstate law and HIPAA compliance requirements and streamline it into one system and one interface.

Beyond that, Power Platform is helping BrightSpring reimagine how businesses in a community-focused healthcare system utilize data to serve a nationwide population.

“There is such an opportunity to write the playbook on how healthcare providers record outcomes,” said Mills. “Power Platform, with our different projects, is allowing us to do that.”

Learn how your organization can leverage Microsoft Dynamics 365 to improve patient care, protect frontline worker safety, and help provide critical medical expertise.

Discover how you can easily build your own low-code apps with Microsoft Power Apps: Watch now