Streamlining healthcare resources to deliver better patient care
CHG Healthcare is an organization that helps healthcare facilities fill staffing gaps by connecting them with providers like doctors, nurses, and technicians.
In the United States, access to timely healthcare is a critical issue. To meet patient demand, many facilities work with CHG Healthcare to quickly staff up during peak periods, find interim practitioners, and hire for high-demand medical specialties.
Behind the scenes, CHG Healthcare handles a lot of data. Until a year ago, that was stored using an on-premises SQL server data warehouse. In order to scale, CHG Healthcare migrated to Snowflake and dbt Cloud.
“Moving from legacy architecture to the cloud was a big jump for our team,” says Mark Menatti, Director II, Data and Engineering at CHG Healthcare. “An experienced partner could guide us through a seamless migration and ensure business continuity.”
To meet their data requirements, CHG Healthcare chose to work with a Resident Architect from dbt Labs’ professional services team.
Legacy infrastructure with a complex environment
For larger organizations like CHG Healthcare, cloud migrations are complex with little room for error.
“Getting your data transformation right the first time is essential,” says Menatti. “If you have to redo your migration or constantly fix issues afterwards, it’s painful for the business—and costly.”
What’s more, CHG Healthcare’s data engineering team was accustomed to monolithic systems. To architect a successful migration with dbt, they needed to learn entirely new best practices: concepts like modular data pipelines and DRY.
It’s a lot to manage—and a cost-efficient modernization would require expert guidance.
Strategic guidance for a smooth cloud migration
By working with a dbt Labs Resident Architect, the data engineering team understood exactly how to architect a new system from the start. The Resident Architect helped them:
- Get CI/CD right the first time. The team quickly implemented best practices for CI/CD. “The Resident Architect brought a depth of expertise that bridged our knowledge gaps,” says Menatti. “Instead of debating if a tactic was right or wrong, we could talk to an expert who always steered us toward the best solution.”
- Develop best practices. The Resident Architect provided training sessions, clear documentation, and tailored examples for macros, project structure and dbt mesh. Now every team member understands how to approach modular architecture.
- Set up infrastructure that’s ready to scale. The Resident Architect ensured that CHG Healthcare designed their data models in a modular, scalable way. As a result, the organization can handle changes to their data systems without disruption to data access. For instance, if a team changes to a new CRM system, they can still track the same metrics for reporting—even though the underlying platform is different.
The dbt Labs’ Resident Architect also supported the marketing team with their own migration. The team needed to modernize their data stack and create a net new data assets—an implementation that the Resident Architect helped them complete seamlessly.
“We accelerated our martech roadmap by an entire quarter,” says Luke Stenis, Principal Product Manager, Data and Engineering at CHG Healthcare. “That amounts to $20,000 in saved time and resources.”
A powerful data foundation, built to scale
By partnering with a dbt Labs Resident Architect, CHG Healthcare implemented an efficient data transformation.
“We got our foundation right from the start,” says Menatti. “There’s little infrastructure work for us to redo, which significantly reduces costs.”
Notably, the data transformation has improved organizational trust and buy-in. In fact, the transformation received the highest ratings in a recent business satisfaction survey—a testament to the work done with dbt Labs.
Now that the modernization is complete, the data engineering team is focused on optimization. For example, they’re scaling up testing and developing more nuanced scenarios for using macros. On the marketing side, CHG Healthcare is building a marketing operations team, which will use their centralized data sets for marketing campaign orchestration.
“We’re confident in our data models and long-term scalability, thanks to dbt Labs’ Resident Architect,” concludes Menatti.
