GeriMedica is a well-established company catering to the Dutch healthcare sector. For over 16 years they’ve specialized in serving elderly care homes. Their services encompass data management for these care homes and maintaining an ERP-like digital medical file system. With a substantial market presence, GeriMedica currently boasts around 130 clients, constituting a commendable 50% market share, and employs a workforce of 90 dedicated professionals.
Challenges
About 90% of end-users (medical and support staff) lacked data expertise.
After testing various BI tools, Sisense was chosen for its user-friendly interface.
However, challenges were encountered with widget scripts and Blox in Sisense.
Technical requirements alienated non-BI expert medical staff.
Challenges arose in designing dashboards for quick data consumption by all users.
Until 2018, GeriMedica primarily focused on exporting medical data for their clients. However, as healthcare professionals increasingly required broader access to data, a new dimension of challenges emerged. While customers utilized data for business intelligence (revenue analysis, cost assessment, and productivity evaluation), end-users - the medical staff - were largely excluded from the data utilization loop. GeriMedica estimated that about 90% of their end-users were not data-savvy, they were medical and support staff, who still needed access to data but lacked the necessary expertise.
“We set out to build a data-business unit that served our customers in the best way possible, with a focus on our end-users which are the medical practitioners”, says Hamza, Head of Data Analytics at GeriMedica. In short, GeriMedica had to build technical dashboards aimed at end-users without technical expertise. And Sisense was chosen as the best platform to build these dashboards on.
However, GeriMedica soon encountered new challenges within Sisense as their requirements evolved. Making the use of widget scripts (which are in javascript) and Blox is necessary but difficult to implement. Hamza: “Sooner or later we always had to make complicated use of Sisense’s SDK that they use to create widgets and quickly had to move to use widget scripts, which is in javascript, or we needed to be working with BLOX, which was also not the best way of doing things.”
These technical requirements further alienated the end users - the medical staff - who are not BI experts. This presented a challenge in terms of designing dashboards and ensuring seamless (and quick) data consumption and analytics by both business customers and medical staff.
Solutions
Facing these challenges GeriMedica turned to Paldi Solutions for help.
Paldi's plugins helped improve user experience and accessibility.
By simplified data filtering, formatting, and visualization.
Increased stability, speed, and satisfaction with Sisense.
No technical training is needed for end-users.
GeriMedica currently uses a multitude of Paldi plugins including:
Facing these challenges GeriMedica reached out to (the fully HIPAA compliant) Paldi Solutions.
“With the help of Paldi Solutions, we were able to leverage Sisense to create a better user experience from a designer and user perspective.” " said Hamza. Helping to realize the growing demand for better user experience and accessibility, Paldi Solutions provided a suite of self-service plugins that addressed these critical needs. With these plugins, GeriMedica was able to craft a superior UX/UI for both dashboard designers and end-users.
One example provided by GeriMedica is how the ability to add filters on a dashboard level - with drop downs - made it much easier for users to both view the data they needed and save it as a favorite filter (bookmark) to review different important data sets with 1 click. This “Filter Bookmark” plugin massively reduced the amount of time medical staff required before viewing potentially life-saving information.
GeriMedica also talked about Paldi’s Expendable Pivot Plugins (Part of Paldi Solution’s new Self-Service powerup), saying that: “One of our most frequently used chart-type is the Expendable Pivot, with its ability to create a really big pivot table quickly, while retaining the power to present a more focused overview by collapsing and expanding sections. As well as its ability to present custom format values, for example from integers to a time format. This is all done with just a click of a button instead of using widget scripts with all kinds of difficulties. With the help of Paldi Plugins, you can just click and it’s there.”
The Paldi plugins solved several endemic problems for GeriMedica by: - Enhancing stability between different Sisense versions. - Improving UX/UI and data clarity. - Optimizing processing speeds. This enabled GeriMedica to leverage the strengths of Sisense while overcoming its challenges. The collaboration with Paldi Solutions allowed for a more intuitive and interactive data visualization, catering to both the medical workers and the business analysts within the elderly care homes.
The benefits derived from Paldi Solutions' integration were gigantic. GeriMedica's end-users, who mainly consist of medical professionals with limited technical proficiency, are now able to immediately access all necessary data without any additional technical training. Paldi’s plugins also facilitated the creation of 60+ predefined dashboards that tell an effective story through data, enhancing interactivity and ease of understanding.
As measured through bi-annual customer surveys, GeriMedica witnessed a substantial spike in customer satisfaction across their application after implementing Paldi's solutions. Users mentioned Paldi’s free “Tutorial Button” plugin specifically as something that helped improve their experience and ability to interact with their data.
Onboarding and Implementation
“Sisense out-of-the-box doesn’t have everything, but it gives the capabilities to use Scripts or community plugins. The downside of using Scripts - and especially community plugins - is maintainability. Sisense version upgrades can break scripts and community plugins, or a certain functionality or feature stops working or gives errors”
That’s where GeriMedica's adoption of Paldi Solutions came in, removing the downsides of not being maintained. Paldi’s plugins were safer in use than community plugins or Scripts, due to their simplified installation and single-click update capabilities. Unlike the extensive manual update process prevalent with other plugin makers. Paldi Solutions also guarantees industry-leading support and maintenance and ensures that clients are always up-to-date with the latest features and improvements on both Windows and Linux.
Future Outlook
Looking ahead, the future outlook is promising. GeriMedica is committed to further enhancing its BI dashboards through continued collaboration with Paldi Solutions. The success of the “Self Service” plugin suite and the “Tutorial Button” is indicative of the potential for more tailored solutions catering to specific pain points within the BI landscape. As both companies continue to evolve, Gerimedica is poised to expand its reach and impact within the healthcare sector, while Paldi Solutions is dedicated to continued innovation in BI plugins and solutions that transform data into actionable insights.
Conclusion
The partnership between GeriMedica and Paldi Solutions exemplifies the power of innovative collaboration in overcoming BI challenges and elevating user experiences. By addressing the unique needs of non-technical end-users within the Dutch healthcare sector, Paldi Solutions enabled GeriMedica to bridge the gap between data-savvy analysts and healthcare professionals.