Background
Cherry Health is a large Federally Qualified Health Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan, serving a patient population of about 79,000 with a broad spectrum of specialties and services. Their core healthcare services include primary care, OB/GYN, pediatrics, vision, dental, behavioral health, correctional residential, psychiatry, physical therapy, methadone treatment, and more. The institution has a network of 900 employees with over 300 providers, and facilities spanning over 26 physical locations in areas such as Wayne, Muskegon, Barry, Montcalm, Eaton, and Kent counties.
Use Case
Due to an extensive network of patients, healthcare professionals, and medical centers, Cherry Health incurred substantial costs in managing data for its comprehensive electronic recordkeeping process and sought solutions to streamline this process.
Cherry Health needed to transform incoming data from production and reporting databases and transfer it to their data warehouse for further analysis. As data was in two different databases, it was difficult to make data-driven decisions without a full picture of operations.
They also wanted a platform that allowed them to integrate data from electronic scanned forms (submitted via mobile devices) into the Cherry Health Electronic Health Record system, which contained electronic patient charts. Cherry Health searched for a user-friendly interface that would not require extensive training in SQL code and SSIS.
Having Astera in our toolset means that we are virtually unlimited in our ability to perform data integration projects in our systems.
Enter Astera
Considering the specific business needs, Cherry Health searched the market for suitable data management solutions. After reviewing several products, they selected Astera.
As Astera offers a high-performance, scalable data integration platform, it allowed Cherry Health to keep up with advanced data needs. Powered by an enterprise-grade, parallel processing engine, Astera offered Cherry Health data syncing, mapping, transformation, parsing, and extraction capabilities, all through a single platform.
The cost savings when not having to print, ship, scan, and shred are significant.
Cherry Health uses Astera to create ETL jobs as part of the data transfer process, in which the data from production and reporting databases is moved to a data warehouse for analysis. The data comes from various sources and formats, including text, reports, log files, PDF, Excel, and several databases. This eliminates the manual handling of patient forms. This also saves the time and money spent on additional steps and enables users to create a readable PDF version of patient charts for future reference.
The tool has made data transformation more accessible. The versatility it offers in where the data comes from, what you can do with/to the data, and where it goes is simply amazing.