Customer Story

CareQuest Institute Makes Equitable Change in Oral Health Care with Data-Driven Mission Delivery

About CareQuest Institute

Launched in 2021 amidst a national reckoning on deep inequities that exist across the U.S., CareQuest Institute is driven to improve an oral health system that does not work for everyone — especially those from marginalized and underserved communities.

CareQuest Institute works toward their mission through grantmaking, research, health improvement programs, policy and advocacy, and education as well as their leadership in dental benefits and innovation advancements. CareQuest Institute collaborates with thought leaders, health care providers, patients, and local, state, and federal stakeholders, to accelerate oral health care transformation and create a system designed for everyone.

CareQuest dug deeper in their data to uncover hidden insights and further their mission of increasing oral health equity

Goals

CareQuest Institute saw great impact in many communities as a result of their efforts, but they wanted to grow their services and offerings to help even more communities in need.

CareQuest Institute’s goal was to automate and advance their data practices so that they could:

  • Accurately perform a cost/benefit analysis of patient care in underserved communities;
  • Drive improved outcomes with key groups;
  • Better understand the impact of their services; and
  • Measure their overall effectiveness at addressing equity issues.

Problem

Having recently separated from one their affiliates, CareQuest Institute had an urgent need to become technologically independent and build their own architecture stack, data management and storage solution, and improve reporting and dashboarding capabilities.

They were also dealing with a large inventory of disorganized data assets not accessible by all decision makers across the organization and amassing more data each day from 20 different sources.

Solution

We conducted a strategic assessment of CareQuest Institute’s technology and business processes and created a data strategy roadmap that outlined a plan to become independent and create their own data and analytics environment. The roadmap included modern cloud technology, a new architecture stack, staffing recommendations, a plan to migrate and ingest data sources, consolidation to one analytics platform, and a plan to hire and train employees.

Guided by a defined data strategy and roadmap, we built a modern data architecture for CareQuest Institute which included Azure Data Factory and Databricks to ingest and transform the data, a data lake, a cloud data warehouse with Snowflake, and a modern analytics solution with Tableau.

Results

With a solid cloud-based foundation in place and an analytics platform that integrates data from CareQuest Institute’s multiple sources, CareQuest Institute now has full independence of their data, IT, and security. In addition, their solution was built to be future proof so it will grow with them while being easy to maintain with their current lean staff.

CareQuest Institute has realized many benefits from their new data and analytics solution including:

  • Improved analytics capabilities that will help identify ways to improve population health, develop better offerings, ensure delivery of equitable programs, identify the correlation between medical and dental issues, reduce cost of care, etc.
  • Better insights into gaps in oral health access and care for veterans.
  • Improved data democratization and adoption of analytics by the implementation of a self-service portal that provides analytics to users throughout CareQuest Institute and even the general public.
  • Improved data governance through the development of a business glossary template, data catalog, and updated security practices.

Get started with a data analytics consultation

Talk to an expert who will review your data struggles and help map out steps to achieve data-driven decision making.

CareQuest Institute for Oral Health is a national nonprofit organization that focuses on creating a more accessible, equitable, and integrated oral health system.

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