Success Story: Skylight Health Group

Skylight Health Group is a healthcare service and technology company, working to positively impact patient health outcomes. The company operates a US multi-state health network that comprises physical multi-disciplinary medical clinics providing a range of services from primary care, sub-specialty, allied health, and laboratory/diagnostic testing. 

The mission of Skylight Health Group is to improve the lives of their patients by offering high-quality, affordable healthcare and delivering integrated medical services with compassion and care. Their clinics are located across the United States with many individual clinics and physicians working on the company's mission. 

As the company expands and acquires new clinic groups, so does the size and assortment of data. Each new acquisition results in a new Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system. An EMR system is the digital version of a paper chart, containing the medical and treatment history of a patient. This information is vital in an effort to provide their patients with efficient health care by safely tracking, organizing, and managing all patient's data. However, each new secure EMR system acquired, strengthened the need for a single system to manage the patient's data.  

While the optimal goal for Skylight Health Group is to deliver value to their customer, the need still arose to find an analytics solution that allowed for data integration from the numerous existing EMR system, various accompanied data sources, and a level of predictive and prescriptive analytics.  

The company already adopted AWS Cloud as their primary Cloud provider, which would host the analytics platform in a secure and cost-effective manner. However, the company required external assistance to define the data ingestion, data integration strategy, and build the analytics platform that would help support their current solution. Without assistance, the company wouldn't be able to pursue its goal of achieving value-based patient care through the use of prescriptive machine learning (ML) models. These ML models enable physicians to make proactive decisions thereby preventing problems before they occur. 

Adastra, one of the top AWS Data and Analytics Consulting partners, was brought on board to help Skylight Health Group. 

Discovery and Assessment  

Adastra’s experts started the engagement by deeply focusing on providing an overall assessment of the current data sources, ranging from the various EMR systems to other accompanying data sources that would be loaded. Following the primary assessment of the current data system in place, the team provided a detailed roadmap defining the data ingestion, data integrations strategy, and the future state of their AWS Analytics platform.  

Detailed Roadmap  

The strategy presented not only focused on the present requirements but also on the needs that may arise as the company continues to scale and perform new acquisitions. Resulting in a detailed breakdown of the various EMR system in accordance with HL7. (HL7 is an international standard used to transfer clinical and administrative data between software applications used by healthcare providers.) To accommodate, several data integration strategies were defined, such as scheduled data pulls through secure APIs to batch extracts using Amazon DMS and AWS Glue JDBC connections. Simply having a strategy to pull data is not enough. The client required a secure, centralized repository that holds all data, allows encryption at rest, an archival strategy, and most importantly a tight integration with other AWS services to deliver the necessary value.  

Amazon S3 Data Lake  

Based on our client’s needs, Amazon S3 Data Lake was the perfect starting solution. Amazon’s S3 Data Lake would satisfy all the requirements mentioned while allowing the organization to further manipulate the data in an insightful and meaningful technique. The data engineering and consultant team worked on various tasks ranging from data profiling, data cleansing, to data manipulation to turn the various semi-structured data formats into a structured format ready for further analytics.  

Amazon Redshift  

The data was now completed and curated insightfully, it was now ready to be loaded into AWS’s fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service – Amazon Redshift. Amazon Redshift proved to be the perfect solution for this particular situation, not only for its tight integration with the AWS ecosystem, but for its ability to reduce the client’s concerns around the various common administrative task; monitoring the health of the clusters, utilization, and costs. This solution enabled the company to re-shift its focus away from IT management, to now their business needs and innovations. In addition to utilizing the new Amazon Redshift RA3 clusters, we were able to decouple the storage thus resulting in the cluster scaling no longer being contingent on an increase in each, but rather being scaled independently. The utilizing of Amazon Redshift allowed for increased performance and a substantial decrease in costs. 

Amazon QuickSights 

Lastly, the solution was tied off by enabling visualizations using Amazon QuickSight. Amazon QuickSight integrates both with Amazon Redshift tables, and the external tables created on the AWS Glue Catalog database tables. The system lets the client to easily create and publish interactive BI dashboards, which can automatically scale to tens of thousands of users without any infrastructure to manage.   

Adastra’s solution suite enabled Skylight Health Group to streamline its working process for employees by re-shifting the focus away from IT management and administrative tasks. The client can utilize their time to better tend and serve their patient through the organized and interactive interface that highlights all of the important data about the client. Staff no longer must check various EMR systems to find patient information, or manually transfer new EMR system information to their analytics platform. Reports can now be accessed in a single system, allowing Skylight Health Group to return to its mission – providing highly accessible and affordable health care.