BIG CITY OPTICAL is a regional eye care practice with 17 locations across Chicago and the city’s North Shore. The team was excited to grow their client base when they acquired a patient list from another local practice. However, BIG CITY OPTICAL was left with the urgency of assembling and validating the new patient list to maximize retention while delivering a seamless experience.
Challenge
Unexpectedly, the newly purchased patient list and corresponding patient record data was dispersed across several spreadsheets, with patient data ranging from name, address, email, and insurance. All of this information had to be uploaded into BIG CITY OPTICAL’s electronic health record (EHR) system.
Furthermore, the thousands of patient health records from the previous package also had to be uploaded to the EHR and correctly matched to the patient profile in the EHR. Time was of the essence because the patients had been promised that BIG CITY OPTICAL would supply them with their health record as requested.
Unfortunately, BIG CITY OPTICAL was looking at files that had an unclear number of patients, missing emails, inconsistent formats, and conflicting contact information.
Based on the data gaps and the need to quickly formulate a communication strategy to reach and retain active customers, without an IT department, the marketing team set out to find a solution. They needed a tool that could cleanse and standardize their data for client outreach, such as email campaigns, and eventually migrate the data to their practice management system (PMS).
With such an urgent, complex task at hand, the team maximized what they initially had to work with, leveraging the little usable data they could access to reach out to clients. As the marketing team began to explore the data set and consider the outreach goals, the division grew more concerned about the lack of confidence, personalization, and risk of sender reputation associated with the data. Claire Kenney, who oversees BIG CITY OPTICAL’s marketing, said that they were essentially put in a position of “building outreach without a firm foundation.”
Solution
While the BIG CITY OPTICAL marketing team communicated through multiple marketing channels how BIG CITY OPTICAL could serve the patients of the former practice, they sought out a way to consolidate, match, standardize, and validate the patient data to kickstart their retention campaign. Experian performed a data quality as a service using Experian's data quality platform, Aperture Data Studio, to support their efforts.
Aperture Data Studio ingested from various data sources with differing data, discrepancies, and formats. At this point, the data was profiled, standardized, validated, and appended with emails. From there, the now-clean data was deduped and harmonized to eliminate duplicate records. Multiple sources were then merged to create a complete and reliable single view of each record.
Transforming the data in this way enabled BIG CITY OPTICAL to see the patient’s name, contact information, insurance information, and other medical data in one record, as opposed to the previously siloed spreadsheets. Now the team had a trustworthy single view of their patients, a data set fit for effective outreach, and eventually their system of records, in only 1.5 weeks. The team was able to lean on their work with Experian to better synch and communicate directly with their EHR. Using corrected and updated contacts through combined efforts empowered the marketing team to ultimately reach over 10K of the former practice’s patients, with the expectation to convert approximately 75% of the active patients. And as part of their migration, the team was able to move 100% of patients with transferrable records to BIG CITYOPTICAL's practice management system. This improved patient list will enhance their team’s efforts as they move forward with their retention campaign
