Highlights

• RudderStack’s transformations feature enabled Accurx to ingest activity data while cleansing sensitive health data, allowing for GDPR compliance
• RudderStack enabled the Accurx team to collect data once and easily route data to Mixpanel
• RudderStack has proven to be a valuable early investment for the analytics team to improve visibility into product usage.

Key Stats

• Accurx was able to set up RudderStack and begin building analytics dashboards in four weeks.
• Product Managers are spending 3x less time to gain valuable product insights to inform new features.
• The Accurx team is now able to track and analyze over 40 million events per month.

Overview

Accurx is a fast-growing healthcare software company founded in 2016. Their easy-to-use platform is used in over 100 hospital trusts and 98% of GP practices while supporting integrated communication across the health and care system.
Accurx’s team started out supporting healthcare professionals in primary care, where they discovered that the day-to-day challenges faced by staff centred around one thing: communication. So they set out on a mission ‘to make healthcare staff happier and patients healthier through seamless communication.Since then, Accurx has transformed digital communication in primary care, and become a trusted partner to NHS trusts nationwide. Through the COVID-19 pandemic, the company’s software enabled video consultations and healthcare surveys for remote monitoring of patients with symptoms. Accurx also built a vaccine booking system in just four weeks that was used to manage almost 30 million life-saving vaccinations.To date, Accurx’s software has been used to message almost 50 million patients. The company has also developed a unique online consultation solution across primary and secondary care, and the first nationally available patient-centred record-sharing platform.

Challenge: Finding a solution doctors can trust

Through 2020, the responsibility of keeping clean, secure data fell on only two employees in the entire company, one Data Scientist and one Data Analyst, both being embedded into product teams. Their analytics environment was essentially just one logging system. As a result, it was difficult to access data - let alone interpret it.

“Before RudderStack, the difficulty was there. We had to rely heavily on the Product Engineers for data collection, cleaning, and modelling,” says Francesca Riva, Head of Data.

When Accurx experienced rapid growth in 2020 and 2021, their team decided to make an unusual move for their industry and start investing in solutions and people focused on analytics early into the company’s growth. This would help them to keep up with increasing demand and continue to effectively develop their products to solve healthcare market needs. They hired the Head of Data and decided to start the research process to purchase a new tool that would allow them to build their customer data infrastructure in a way that was secure, scalable and compliant with healthcare and privacy regulations.

As a part of this process, GDPR compliance was non-negotiable. They also needed a solution that their clients (doctors, hospitals, and other medical institutions) could trust. This was a unique challenge since Accurx is a B2B company but their clients are B2C. As a result, they needed a third-party solution that did not store institutional or end-customer data.

Given the Accurx team did not have a large data team, they needed a solution that would be intuitive to implement without a heavy engineering lift.

Solution: Implementing a secure system in just four weeks

After extensive research, the Accurx team chose RudderStack as their analytics solution, knowing they could set it up and also scale quickly.

“We implemented RudderStack to start a ‘revolution’ in our analytical environment,” says Fran. In February, Accurx’s implementation of RudderStack started as a POC and quickly expanded to a full contract. It only took them four weeks to get the RudderStack solution up and running. “RudderStack was not only easy to implement but easy to train our teams on. It’s quite easy for them to see what is happening,” Fran continues. One of their favourite parts of their implementation was using RudderStack’s intuitive documentation.

RudderStack enabled the Accurx team to be compliant with healthcare and security regulations like GDPR. They implement strict governance controls to eliminate user identifiers.

The Accurx team uses RudderStack’s Event Stream to send their events on a configurable sync schedule to Snowflake. Additionally, they send events in real-time to Mixpanel for product analytics. They also are planning to bring key third-party connections like Salesforce into their warehouse as a next step.

As a follow-up to setting up these initial data pipelines, the Accurx team has already begun brainstorming additional ways to use RudderStack. “Implementing RudderStack brought our various teams closer together. Engineering, developer operations, product management, and analytics feel much closer to each other and are now brainstorming additional use cases for RudderStack,” shares Fran.

Results: Product management spends 3x less time in non-value-add tasks

Today, the Accurx team can securely track and analyse over 40 million events per month while stripping the data of PII. RudderStack’s data governance features - including tracking plans and transformations - build trust in the data across the company.

The Accurx team likes having RudderStack partnered with Snowflake as their warehouse since it enables them to be centered on a SQL-based product. Since most analysts are proficient in SQL, this is ideal as it makes their workday more efficient. Additionally, their teams can enrich data in Snowflake from a variety of external sources. “Having RudderStack and Snowflake enables our team to have everything that we need for analytics and management dashboards. We can easily go from the source data to model data to Power BI all in one place, without taking the data out of the Snowflake ecosystem,” says Fran.

Previously, their product teams had a hard time tracking product usage and consistently had to reach out to engineering teams for help building dashboards. Now, Accurx Analytics and Product teams are independent and easily add a new source or destination quickly on the RudderStack control plane and get data flowing in minutes. As a result, Product Managers spend 3x less time on non-value-added tasks such as data collection and cleanup.

Product Engineers at Accurx are thrilled with the success of RudderStack and have already begun brainstorming other uses for the tool, including enriching behavioral data in Snowflake with additional data in Accurx’s other SaaS tools and activating it with RudderStack’s Reverse ETL product.

In conclusion, Fran recommends RudderStack to her peers: “Invest in analytics tools early. Implementing RudderStack enabled us to build a solid foundation for our data maturity journey. We are now more nimble in deriving insights from our data and experimenting with new more advanced use cases.”

Accurx Data Stack

Destinations: Mixpanel, Power BI, Salesforce

Sources: .net, Javascript

Warehouses: Snowflake