Data Warehouses for DSOs

Alright, what's the deal with this "Data Warehouse" thing?

Over the past few years it's become a buzz word in almost every industry, but especially in dental.

Here's the TL;DR: a data warehouse is a centralized location where data from many different locations can be moved, cleaned up, and stored. It typically serves as the hub for a variety of reports, dashboards, and applications.

Useful? Absolutely. Simple? Well, this is dental. It can't be too easy. If you want to learn more, read on!

The Need

To understand the conversation about data management, we need to back up and look at the fundamental need that drives it: Clarity. Here at AccruDent, we consider clarity to be a critical necessity for any business leader.

If you want your DSO to do well, you simply cannot operate on "gut feelings" alone.

If you had a crappy month, you need to know it.

If you knocked it out of the park this month, you need to know it.

If it takes you 50% longer to get your claims back than industry average, you need to know it.

You want your associate doctors to get paid fairly, and they need to know it.

Simply put, clean and organized data represents the truth about your business, and you want that data driving every decision you make.

The Problem

I've been working in the dental industry since I was 17 years old and I love it as much as anyone. With that background I'm allowed to say this: our software sucks.

Now, we've come a long way, and I know many developers that are working hard to create better solutions. That doesn't change the fact that our software is archaic and nothing integrates well with anything else.

The data that you need is sitting inside various softwares: your PMS, your accounting software, your CRM, etc. As you probably know, manually gathering that data and trying to do something with it is an enormous task.

The Solution

If I were a software vendor this is when I would pull back my red curtain to reveal my faintly glowing software product that can fix all of your problems.

Haha, I wish.

The true solution to the problem is that you need all of your data retrieved, cleaned, organized, and gathered into one place.

The business world has known about this solution for a long time. In technical terms each piece of software that houses operational data is called a data source, the process of collecting that data is called ETL, and the resultant set of usable data is called a data warehouse, or sometimes a data lake (although they're technically different things, we'll group them here for simplicity).

Data warehouses are used to power all sorts of things, from reports and dashboards to custom applications and (our favorite) accrual accounting. The applications truly are limitless.

Therefore, what??

There is a wide variety of software and vendors ready to solve this problem for you. This blog post isn't intended to recommend a specific software or vendor, but to clarify and contextualize the conversation for anyone getting into it.

If you have more questions about this stuff or just want to chat, I'm an absolute nerd and would love to make time for you. My line is open at (435) 554-8826 or dallin@accrudent.com.

Go, fight, win, and remember that DATA IS KING.