Guest Post: Delivering Valuable Data to Medical Researchers

In this guest post, Joyce Mui, Program Manager at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, discusses the benefits of a modern data stack with Fivetran, Google BigQuery and Tableau.

As cloud computing becomes the norm, organizations like ours, Health Data Compass at the Colorado Center for Personalized Medicine, continue to partner with innovative organizations to advance our mission of supporting research analytics. Fivetran has proven to be one of these technology acceleration organizations.

Fivetran focuses on creating easy-to-use data pipelines that are efficient and, most important to Compass, cloud-native. In 2015, Compass entered into a partnership with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to take advantage of the managed services and scalability of GCP for our healthcare research analytics data warehouse and secure analytics platform. Jue Wang, Compass Lead BI Developer, researched organizations capable of providing a low-maintenance, high-value accelerator to get data from Salesforce to Google BigQuery, and found Fivetran was the most capable organization, with the tools to meet our high standards and requirements. GCP’s capabilities and security measures make the platform a scalable home for our enterprise organizational data and analytics demands. Fivetran’s automated data integration with GCP via APIs also fits within our technical direction and supports our efforts to increase efficiency and automation internally and for our customers, who are researchers seeking to advance clinical discoveries.

In keeping with the innovative mindset and mission on the Anschutz Medical Campus (University of Colorado, UC Health, Children’s Hospital and CU Medicine), Compass entered into a partnership with Fivetran to bring our researchers’ requests within Salesforce into Google BigQuery for analytics. By utilizing the Fivetran Salesforce connector, over 117 tables containing data about researches and their requests are synced every fifteen minutes from Salesforce. No other tool provided the same seamless integration between these two platforms with this level of automation.

With Salesforce data in Google BigQuery via Fivetran, Compass now gathers insights and from customer data in multiple ways. Customer data within Google BigQuery is rendered into Tableau dashboards, where researchers view the status of their Compass data requests, allowing a quick visual for progress and estimated request completion. In addition, summary data such as the frequency of requests from departments, types of requests, and most requested data, are used to improve efficiencies and track completions of requests within the Compass team. By using Fivetran technology, Salesforce data in Google BigQuery, and the clinical and genomics data in the Compass data warehouse, we now have the ability to deliver the most valuable data to researchers to help support grants and advance personalized medicine more efficiently, saving approximately 40 hours of work per quarter.

Fivetran contributes significantly to Compass’s overall mission to deliver quality services for research analytics by providing a product that seamlessly integrates with the heterogeneous platforms Compass already uses: GCP and Salesforce. By gathering Salesforce customer data into the same space as the other pieces of our data warehouse (Google BigQuery), we can run analytics and create dashboards to internally innovate, improve and, ultimately, deliver more value to researchers.

Ready to learn how Fivetran can help your organization achieve its data goals? Sign up for a personalized demo or start your free trial today.

About Health Data Compass: Health Data Compass is part of the Colorado Center for Personalized Medicine on the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, Colorado. Our mission is to empower our partners with advanced health data analytics.

About Fivetran: Shaped by the real-world needs of data analysts, Fivetran technology is the smartest, fastest way to replicate your applications, databases, events and files into a high-performance cloud warehouse. Fivetran connectors deploy in minutes, require zero maintenance, and automatically adjust to source changes — so your data team can stop worrying about engineering and focus on driving insights.

About BigQuery: BigQuery is Google’s serverless, highly scalable, enterprise data warehouse designed to make all your data analysts productive at an unmatched price-performance.

About Tableau: Tableau helps people see and understand their data. The Tableau platform provides the breadth and depth of capabilities that enterprises need, and adapts to your environment with unmatched flexibility and choice, while meeting the toughest governance and security requirements. People love using Tableau because it is both powerful and intuitive. Tableau leads the industry with the most passionate user community, over 86,000 customer accounts, and a commitment to customer-focused innovation.