Impensa accelerates time to market with Astrato’s No-Code Analytics

Impensa’s less technical team leveraged Astrato’s no-code analytics platform to process and deliver stunning analytics to customers in days rather than weeks, which is allowing the company to scale efficiently.

Introduction

Founded in 2019, Impensa is an innovative boutique healthcare technology company that specializes in supply chain data management and analytics solutions for the healthcare industry.  David Beto, Founder & CEO of Impensa, is a healthcare veteran of over 40 years, having worked in hospital finance and operations, as well as in the healthcare consulting and IT. Over the course of his career, he leveraged his deep industry knowledge to build and sell a successful financial decision support company back in 2015.

Impensa was founded to address the perpetual challenges of interoperability, transparency, visibility, and actionable data in the healthcare supply chain, aiming to resolve long-standing data issues.  Impensa transforms siloed supply chain data into actionable insights as a data services partner to hospitals and health systems, healthcare system vendors, and management consultants.

Beto explained, “Supply chain data is very siloed throughout healthcare organizations, poorly maintained due to understaffed manual processes, and lacks the interoperability required to create transparent and actionable analytics.  Healthcare professionals are often driving blind, with the potential for significant downstream impact on patients. For example, the lack of required supply items identified in the middle of a surgery.  This creates a domino effect of delays, which in the end introduces patient safety issues and increases costs.”

Rob Corley, Beto’s partner and career healthcare supply chain data management expert, designed and built CostCloud, Impensa’s data management platform, which maintains 8M+ curated, standardized and categorized healthcare products as a reference master data asset used to enhance hospital supply chain data.  Impensa’s healthcare partners now gain actionable insights of their hospital clients through Snowflake data sharing and/or Impensa’s analytics platform built in Astrato.

“Process efficiency is crucial in healthcare, especially in the supply chain.  The industry’s lack of product standardization complicates this.  Hospitals often find it difficult to categorize identical products from different suppliers, making it almost impossible to monitor stock levels and contract pricing, which of course leads to frequent overspending or missed revenue opportunities.  Impensa streamlines this process by enhancing the hospital’s supply chain data to address these challenges”, said Corley.

Challenges and Need for Change

Before Astrato, Impensa relied on PowerBI to build custom one-off analytics on a project-by-project basis.  However, their subject matter experts, being non-technical, struggled to build analytics quickly, limiting speed to market and the business’s ability to scale efficiently.  Impensa desired to build a scalable SaaS-based application to streamline and provide guided analytics to support their partners.   Beto explained “Most of our partners are finance analytic types that live in spreadsheets and struggle with manually trying to make sense of extremely complex supply chain data.  We really needed a UI platform which was streamlined, simplified, and provided them visibility into their hospital clients supply spend and the ROI opportunities available.”

 

Faster development with Astrato’s No Code Solution

With Snowflake as the foundation of their platform, Impensa needed a faster way to build analytics. PowerBI, Tableau, and Domo were ruled out due to complexity and cost. Astrato’s no-code UI allowed their non-technical team to build customer-facing analytics in days, not weeks at a fraction of the cost.

“Given Astrato is 100% cloud-native live-query, tightly integrated with the speed and scalability of Snowflake, we can now rapidly process a customer’s data and build streamlined actionable analytics,
in just hours/days compared to weeks/months previously. 
We have been able to automate almost everything, which just wasn’t possible with PowerBI and our skill sets.”

Beautiful Dashboards and Apps

Impensa is now able to build stunning analytics and workflows that feel more like apps, which are amazing their partners. Beto explained, “The experience we have built for our partners with Astrato feels more like a SaaS application rather than a BI tool. They are shocked and literally scratching their heads trying to work out how we have built such a great product in such a short timeframe.  It’s really helping to drive new business development opportunities.”

 

Lower TCO to support future growth

With Astrato there is no infrastructure to manage or maintain, plus the ease and speed of development means less specialist resources are required to onboard more customers. Combined with Astrato’s competitive commercial model means Impensa can scale their business efficiently.  “I don’t think we would have been able to scale to where we are now with Astrato. We don’t really need many technical people!” exclaimed Beto.

 

Future outlook with Astrato Actions

Impensa is now starting to look at how they can use Astrato’s exciting new Actions and Writeback capability to build new workflow product offerings.  One fascinating use case involves integrating FDA healthcare product recall data with hospital inventory and logistics data to provide near real-time updates on recalled items and then help hospitals efficiently manage these recalls via review and approval workflow built in Astrato.

“With Astrato we are building guided, multi-step workflows, which allows approvals with data stamps, creating all the documentation needed for hospital audits.  It will help healthcare workers do away with much of the manual paperwork. It’s also a game changer for improving patient safety.”

For more information on Astrato’s Self-Service Business Intelligence Solution please contact hello@astrato.io